Our performative morality

Why we delete “toxic” friends to avoid facing ourselves

OpinionsGao Ruijia — Published April 5, 2026 4 minutes

In a digital landscape built on curated "healing" and therapy-speak, she did the unthinkable: she showed a raw, ugly, human part of herself without the shielding of a growth arc or a pre-packaged apology. 

The internet revolted. But the sheer vitriol of the backlash reveals something far more concerning than one girl’s envy. It is a massive red flag for the performative morality of our generation. We have become a culture that praises “authenticity” in theory, yet spits on it the moment it looks like a flaw we haven’t been taught how to market.

This collective meltdown happened because that girl acted as a mirror. We live in an era where technology has made us despise our own vulnerabilities, conditioning us to believe that if a feeling isn't "healthy," it shouldn't exist. When she admitted to jealousy, she broke the unspoken social contract of the 2020s: never admit to an emotion that makes you look like the villain. 

The backlash wasn't actually about protecting her friend; it was a frantic attempt by the masses to distance themselves from their own suppressed messiness. By publicly dragging her, commenters weren’t "defending loyalty." They were signalling to the world, “Look at me! I’m one of the good ones!” 

This desperation to be seen as "correct" highlights a deeper, more unsettling reality. We are obsessed with the performance of being a good person, often at the direct expense of actually being one. We have turned morality into a series of checkboxes by using the right terminology and shunning the "toxic" person of the week. 

But there is a massive gap between virtue and compliance. 

In a world where your social capital is tied to your likability, "being good" has become a survival strategy. We do what "seems” right because the alternative is social excommunication. 

We’ve created a "cancel-proof" shell of moral buzzwords, but by the time we reach the "jealous friend" TikTok, we’ve been so well-trained in the art of the performance that any deviation from the script feels like a personal attack on our collective delusion of perfection.

When we treat morality as a script, we inevitably start treating people as props. This is where the performance turns into something more clinical and cold: the era of the Disposable Friend. 

Because we are so focused on maintaining our own moral "brand," we have lost the capacity to handle the messiness of actual human beings. If a friend reveals a flaw like jealousy, pettiness or anger, they are no longer seen as a person to be understood. They are seen as a "toxic asset" to be liquidated. 

We have been coached by infographics to believe that any relationship that isn't 100 per cent "affirming" is a threat to our peace. 

In this framework, the jealous friend isn't a human to be challenged. She is a faulty product that should be discarded.

This mindset is a masterclass in modern alienation. We scream for "relatability" from influencers, but it’s a bait-and-switch. We only want the version of vulnerability that has already been processed through a "growth arc." We want the "pretty-raw" content, not the reality of someone who is currently failing. 

When someone shows us the latter, it breaks the illusion. It reminds us that people are actually difficult and unpredictable. Because we’ve lost the communal tools to handle difficulty, we choose to simply delete the person instead. 

We’ve traded the deep, messy roots of real intimacy for a shallow, manicured lawn of "likability" where anyone who lets a weed grow is immediately evicted.

Essentially, the backlash to the “jealous friend” reflects a culture where morality is shaped by visibility and public reaction. If we strip away the comments, the likes and the public shaming, what is left of our morality? 

We are performing for a crowd that doesn't actually care about us, using "goodness" as a shield to hide the fact that we are just as flawed as the girl in the video. 

We’ve prioritized being perceived as good over the actual, gruelling work of being a person who can handle their own ugliness. We’ve turned ourselves into products for consumption, and like any product, any defect must be recalled and erased.

This brings us to the question we rarely stop to ask ourselves: When we strive to be a "good person," are we doing it out of a genuine love for others, or is it just a performance to ensure we stay desirable? If the goal is simply to be liked, are we actually being "nice" or are we just afraid of what would happen if the world saw who we really are when the phone is off?