Anger makes me angry. It is such a strong emotion but it achieves nothing. It lingers beyond any reasonable length of time and affects my ability to reason, my mood and the mood of those around me. I wish I did not get angry.
I suppose demonstrating anger can have some benefit on occasion. If I am interacting with somebody and I witness their anger, then I can modify my own behaviour, as well as making a mental note to try to avoid a similar situation in future.
It is also better to express anger than to bottle it up. Expressing it helps to work it through and move on more quickly, as well as giving useful signals to others. In a marriage, if nobody ever gets visibly angry, then perhaps there is a lot of resentment being built up and primed to explode into serious conflict.
I am not sure if I suffer more or less than others from anger, and also not sure if the emotion shows its ugly face more or less than when I was younger. I do know that I have learned a few tricks to mitigate it. Driving in New York is the most obvious one. I consciously set myself up in a cheerful mood when I am driving. It is one of my two driving rules, the other being never to be in a hurry. When I succeed, I can brush off the most terrible behaviour by other drivers with a snide remark (thankfully, one they will never hear) or a little joke. Safe in the bubble of my own vehicle, that helps avoiding any anger boiling up inside me.
I suspect I try the same approach outside the bubble, and there it is less successful. In an interaction with another, if I am becoming angry then there is a fair chance that the counterparty is becoming angry too. In that situation the snide remark or joke can be precisely the worst approach. I make that mistake time and again.
At work, I remember that I had an anger threshold. If anger was rising, I could give myself a little warning and cool it for a while. If that did not work, I would issue a warning to the room. Sadly, I was not very good at that, because people rarely seemed to notice. And that final trigger often came too late, only a few seconds before the explosion. There is little point of a warning when it arrives too late. Others were usually impaired by their own rising anger, and the explosion was rarely averted.
For the last couple of days I have suffered a simmering version of anger. There is no danger of an explosion. Indeed I understand that the anger is pointless. But I know it will only go away very slowly, and, while it is there, my disposition will be anything but sunny.
The trigger for this bout of anger is also rather typical. I don’t tend to become angry over injustice or misfortune. If I receive a parking ticket, even a harsh one, I can quietly process it by remembering the other hundred recent times when I had parked slightly illegally and got away with it.
No, this anger stems from politics. I was in a rather pointless discussion about Covid vaccinations. My basic opinion is that people should just shut up and get the vaccine, unless their medical or religious reason not to is unarguable. It is easy, it is free, it is painless, and it helps everybody, even if only marginally. There are too many amateur medics walking around spouting excuses. If this is about liberty, should we all stop obeying stop signs or driving on the correct side of the highway? Public safety requires rules, and it is no serious restriction of liberty to follow many of them.
My counterparty in the discussion sort of agreed with me, but then added that one reason that people were not getting vaccinated was that earlier the Democrats had sown distrust in the vaccine. Now I am fairly sure this argument is poppycock. The Democrats that I heard did no such thing, but did suggest, reasonably enough, that Trump was not trustworthy when touting remedies before medicine had supported them. Even if the claim is true, how could it be that the vaccination rate among Democrats is now much higher than among Republicans? It surely makes no sense that any Democrat campaign against trusting vaccines would be listened to more by people from the other party.
What a pointless thing this is to become angry about. The sad thing is that I can’t stop myself. Even sadder, I spend my life walking into similar situations. Isn’t that a definition of madness?
When I get angry, it lingers, and my anger spreads to encompass so many things. This week I am angry with myself for walking into a high anger-risk situation, then for becoming angry. I am angry with my wife for pointing this out, and with the counter party for not knowing better. But that is just the start. I am angry with Donald Trump, with Rupert Murdoch and the entire American or even global population for stalling the glorious progress of the enlightenment. Of course, all of it is pretty useless. It is true that great changes occur in society when people rise up, but the cost in anger is immense and I am not sure I can achieve much of that on my own.
My anger dies down after a while. After all West Ham beat Liverpool yesterday, and West Ham literally never beat Liverpool. But it takes longer than it should, and I have seen how some people become stuck in an angry attitude. It develops into rage and all logic goes out of the window, effective social life becomes impossible and everybody suffers. Go to a subway station in a poor part of the city and listen, and you will hear so much anger. There is also a macabre end game when anger becomes exhausted and is replaced by despair. At that point the mind expects the worst to happen, and is no longer angered by it but accepts it stoically like a zombie. Tragically, for many in twelve-step programs, this predicament is the best possible outcome.
I know anger is harmful, but is it becoming more prevalent? I know it feels that way, especially in the USA, but I have no reliable benchmark to prove it. What does seem to be clear is that one half of the political spectrum and most of the media provoke anger as their prime weapon to spur support and attention, and that modern technology makes that easier than ever. In this situation it would seem to be likely that anger has intensified.
What can be done? At the level of society, I can think of very little. It is good that the psychology profession has developed anger management therapies, but surely these can only effect a small segment of any population? For the storm of political anger, we probably have to ride it out and wait for education and technology to catch up as antidotes, but that will surely be a long wait.
At the individual level, the remedies are obvious but hard to grasp. Emotions are emotions and expressing them is better than bottling them up, so our best hope is to try to avoid trigger situations and then to use calming techniques once the anger has taken hold. I can’t claim to be very effective at either of these aids.
I am attracted to trigger situations ever so easily, and a part of me does not want to change that. We learn by engaging and provoking risky situations, and curiosity and learning are not things I want to temper. I might educate some others too. But I should certainly pull back more often – and a lifetime of failure should not defer me from continuing to try.
For me, calming techniques can alleviate symptoms, but a calm environment is really the only cure. I am lucky enough to enjoy that blessing for most of the time. Church helps, and so does volunteering. I am surrounded by many kind and calm people, notably my wife. This last observation is a salve for me, but only makes me feel sadder for those angry people in the subway. Anger is truly a blight for many, and the road to healing feels slow.
Now I have one more thing to be angry about.
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