Strangers fight and scrap and rumble in the comments sections of online stories. Social media pages are used to threaten and traduce. Callers to talkback radio foam at the mouth. Letter writers call for their politicians to be sacked, investigated or sent to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Newspaper columnists dig into entrenched positions, giving not an inch while they denigrate and demean and disparage the other side.

Unhappy consumers use Twitter to publicly shame the company they feel has let them down, swapping the phone (which they would once have used to contact the company directly) for the megaphone. Corporate boycotts are routinely called for – for companies that are seen to be too socially progressive (federal Resources Minister Matt Canavan last week called on Queenslanders to avoid banking with Westpac) or not socially progressive enough.

So are Australians angry because life has never been harder or are they angry just because they’re angry?

The list of modern grievances and irritations is extensive, including million-dollar mortgages in Melbourne and Sydney, the casualisation of the workforce, sophisticated scams and a workplace that, thanks to email, follows employees home at night.

But it’s not all bad.

Australia sidestepped the recession that hit America and Britain after the Global Financial Crisis. Research shows we continue to build some of the biggest houses in the world – a source of great concern for environmentalists, but hardly a sign of a nation that is struggling to get by.

We have a lifestyle that would have been unimaginable a generation ago – bigger televisions, more television channels, safer cars, home internet, movies on demand, mobile phones that allow us to keep in touch with anyone at any time. A Westpac report last year found Australian millennials were spending an incredible $11.3 billion, baby boomers $9.8b and generation X $6.8b on overseas travel each year.

We’ve got more stuff and we’re having more experiences. So why are so furious? 

Perhaps we’re tired. Writer Bob Ellis, in a 2014 book in which he detailed his 10 laws of life, said the principal product of the internet was sleeplessness. Maybe we just need to turn everything off every now and then.