How Can We Better Leverage On Anger?
Let’s talk about Japan hottest kitten. Hello Kitty. HA HA. Just kittening! Okay, don’t kill me. Since you (and me really) are already mildly annoyed at the weak joke attempt, let’s talk about the usefulness of anger today. Let’s begin by acknowledging that being angry feels good. Even though we may consciously experience it in an upsetting rush of warmth adrenaline coursing through our veins, it feels inappropriately comfortable in that very moment.
We’ve all felt this way before, of which we’re usually more angry in our mental life than our actual life. We like to picture ourselves winning imaginary arguments that are never actually going to take place. These arguments are usually prompted from conversations we accidentally (or not…) overhear in public places of old and young couples.
Either that, or these arguments come from a place of injury and injustice.
It comes off as a relief to know that we’ve got something we want to defend. It doesn’t really matter whether we’re right or wrong, or even rational, in most cases. What matters more is that we feel we’re doing something right. We’re fighting for our own right to be right. But anger, just like ice cream (I’m looking at you, ice cream addicts), is similar to a lot of other things that feel good, but it devours us overtime from the inside out.
It is probably more insidious than most vices, because we can reasonably point at the emotion and subscribe to an unwavering belief that anger is a form of permissible pleasure. We understand that acting out of anger is a disagreeable behaviour, but it is a fundamentally healthy, arguably involuntary reaction to negative stimuli thrown at our faces by the world. When we allow anger to be recognised like pain or nausea, we accept it whole-heartedly.
We accept it with our arms so wide open that sometimes we simply want to indulge in anger; for fun.
But anger should not be abused this way. In fact, I believe anger can be leveraged on for its energy. Instead of using anger to express ourselves, we can use it to progress ourselves. We should be angry when we fear the unknown, because fear of the unknown is generally far worse than the fear of something specific. What is the worst thing that could happen? Be precise. Define it. If we can’t, then we ought to be angry.
We ought to be angry at ourselves.
It is easy to put success on the pedestal and quote ideals from books which we feel we’ll never quite touch, but if we actually put in the work to understand, these people have no more credence than us. We are all just standing on piles of collective fiction. One day we’ll realise that the anger we own ends up owning us. There is a point in being angry, and the point is not to keep ourselves angry, but to do something about what makes us angry.
Why would we let the blindness of anger conceal the light of possibilities?
Anger has a real utility, and it is one I think we sometimes forget, and that is: anger stirs us up inside, unsettles us and forces us to engage with that which isn’t easily solved. Most of the time we are rewarded for solving what appears to be unsolvable. More than that, we’re delighted for doing so. Many of us think of changing the world, but not many of us think of changing ourselves first. Perhaps it is time to purrsuade ourselves, before we try to purrsuade others. Get it?
