Got grievances? Get in line and join the crowd.

Welcome to the grievance culture where billionaires as well as common folk  are complaining and sometimes even protesting about real and imagined wrongs, including unfair treatment.

One billionaire, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerburg, went on Joe Rogan’s show earlier this year and criticized corporate cultures, including his, for becoming too “feminine.” This has suppressed the  “masculine energy” in companies and contributed to the ditching of “valuable traits like aggression,” which has “neutered” the workplace. (As this Fast Company article notes, this rant doesn’t relate to reality, as promoting rigid masculinity in the workplace does not correlate to excellent corporate performance.)

Another billionaire, Elon Musk, is known for regularly posting and re-tweeting rage-inducing as well as misleading information on X, his privately-owned social media site –- among other things.

Then there’s the rest of us. The recently released 2025 edition of the global Edelman Trust Barometer “Trust and the Crisis of Grievance”  captured a statistically significant percentage of these voices and sentiments in its latest survey results.

The big headline: Global grievance is growing while trust continues to erode, due to the continuing fears around globalization, economic challenges, and technology, especially AI.

This year’s report—Edelman’s 25^th consecutive one—show a majority of respondents worldwide (61%) hold grievances against government, businesses, and the rich. In particular, respondents believe that government and business are making their lives harder by serving narrow interests, such as the wealthy. Wealthy people  benefit unfairly from “the system” while regular people struggle, according to these respondents.

Survey respondents with a high sense of grievance—who tend to be lower-income—don’t trust any of the four institutions that Edelman measures (business, government, media and non-governmental organizations, that is NGOs). And as for AI, those with a sense of high grievance view it more suspiciously than others do.

Furthermore, those with a high sense of grievance say that business “is not doing enough to address issues like affordability, climate change, job retraining, misinformation, and discrimination,” according to the Edelman report.

And 40% of this aggrieved group approves of “hostile activism” to bring about change. What does  hostile activism look like? These respondents said they’d approve of one or more of these actions: attacking people online, intentionally spreading disinformation (yes, even though they want business to do more about misinformation), threatening or committing violence, or damaging public or private property. Respondents between the ages of 18 to 34 were even more enthusiastic about hostile activism with 53% approving.

At the same time, nearly 66% of respondents around the globe worry about experiencing prejudice, discrimination, or racism. That’s a 10 point jump from last year. And if you’re wondering, this increase includes white US respondents too.

Not surprisingly, in this climate of high grievance and low trust, optimism about the future has declined. Only 36% of respondents said they picture a better future. In developed countries, including the U.S., the percentage drops to 20%.

About the only good news – if you can call it that – is that respondents , especially those with a sense of grievance, see a role for business in dealing with societal problems. For instance, respondents support CEOs  stepping up to address issues when they can make a difference and improve their business performance at the same time. Or, if the businesses are fixing problems they caused and/or contributed to, and their customers, employees and communities have been harmed. These societal problems business could tackle include affordability, climate, retraining, misinformation, and discrimination.

Respondents also believe businesses can nurture workplace civility. For example, businesses could facilitate discussions about contentious issues. Now, whether businesses will want to step into this role is unclear.

Yet, Edelman advises businesses to act, although the PR firm acknowledges that business cannot act alone. All four groups—business, government, media, and NGOs need to work together to address the root causes of grievance and then invest in quality information, job skills and local communities to deliver meaningful results and rebuild trust.

By the way, last April, the longtime New York Times columnist Frank Bruni anticipated this situation with his latest book The Age of Grievance. (Notice he decided no subtitle was needed.)

His book, which is focused on the U.S., examines the ways in which grievance has come to define current culture and politics, on both the right and left. As I’ve started to read the book, I appreciate how the first sentence captures this grievance culture: “Let me tell you how I’ve been wronged.” He writes that more and more Americans are living mired in resentment, convinced that they are losing because someone else is winning. The blame game has become the country’s most popular sport and victimhood its most fashionable garb, he explains. And it’s poison to our collective culture.

Bruni’s way out is for all of us to practice more humility. This includes politicians, activists, businesspeople, and everyone else. But will that solve the problem of how grievance has instilled in us a zero-sum mindset? The downside of a  “zero-sum mindset” is that we believe one person’s gain must result in another person’s loss. In this case there’s only one “winner” and everyone else becomes a “loser.”

What is our way out? Any suggestions?