When I look at the kinds of articles people post on social media and the comments under them, it feels like there’s an overwhelming amount of hate and anger in the world - or at least among the people posting and commenting. (Maybe it’s just that non-angry people don’t spend much time in this kind of spaces.)
In contrast, when I think about my own life, I realize that I’m almost never angry. I feel many other negative emotions, sure, but anger isn’t one of them, and even when it arises it’s usually quite short-lived. I can’t even name a single person I hate - neither in my personal life nor in the media. I simply don’t spend time dwelling on people I’m not interested in or being angry at the world for not meeting my expectations.
This makes me wonder: is my experience rare or unusual? Or is hate and anger simply overrepresented in the media because those emotions motivate people to engage, making them seem far more widespread than they actually are?
I’m trying to understand rather than criticize. I can’t take credit for not being angry because whatever tha skill is doesn’t translate into other things like anxiety. I’m anxious about equally trivial things and I can’t help myself. I guess I’m just glad I don’t need to deal with this constant anger too.
I lived without anger for almost 15 minutes today.
That’s almost a record.
I believe that our media are actively stoking outrage and shock.
People have a built-in tendency to pay more attention to danger than opportunity: if you fail to notice some berries on a bush you won’t necessarily die but if you fail to notice a scorpion on the path you may very well die. So people react strongly to negative information.
This strong reaction registers as “engagement” and media think they must be offering info that people want. In the digital age, engagement can be counted and tracked, which allows you to quickly adapt and do more of whatever creates that engagement.
We’ve been experiencing that optimization loop for the last 20 years and it is now at a deafening roar. We don’t have problems in the world, we have existential crises. We don’t have political disagreements, we have mortal enemies. We don’t have a venal buffoon for a president, we have a fascist dictator murdering rapist psychopath.
This isn’t the only factor but it is significant and it is also new. Yes, there has been sensationalism in the last but it is new to be able to track media consumption like this and adapt on the fly, automatically. It’s taken us to a whole new level.
I know what you speak of. I am of course unhappy or disappointed or frustrated ih certain situation, but really rarely angry. In those rare situations its usually not longer than 5 to 10 min. In situations my friends are angry I am more often sad. Only once in my life (let’s say after 5yo) I shouted at someone - to defend a good friend who was treated incredibly unjust. That’s 17 years ago…
I never hated anyone. I think I could hate some politicians but I know them not personally so I cannot have that much emotion for them. For people I know I always have explanations for their behavior keeping me from being angry about them. Still wanting excusions so I am not excusing them for their actions but knowing (or thinking I know) why they behave like they do I cannot be angry. I think its too much emapthy in my case?
While I was going through my posts on Twitter and deleting them all, I noticed that nearly all of the were gripes or complaints about something during my day. That’s not to say I had a lot of bad days but I’d be more likely to want to vent them than just vibing through the good days in social media silence. Each person is very different, but unless I was in a space where socializing was a daily thing, my tendency was to be more negative than positive Most of the time.
You can work on becoming self actualized, it’s a process but it is something that can be improved.
I’ve been arguing for years that you cannot find world peace until everyone finds inner peace. There are many practices you can follow to quell that inner turmoil. I think most people aren’t even aware of how unbalanced and unsettled they are and instead blame external forces outside of their control. I feel like it has gotten worse in recent years. I have no idea how to steer others out of their inner chaos. Religion, mindfulness, music, pharmaceuticals, sex, the outdoors, sailing, stargazing, pottery wheels - there are many ways. Social media and TV do not usually help.
I’m Autustic and don’t seem to have anger. “Frustrated” is similar, I got that one just fine, but anger doesn’t seem to come up. I don’t seem to have a bunch of them, though. So, I have definitely noticed the same thing. The internet is so full of anger, and it mostly just seems to serve to temporarily compromise the intellect of the person feeling it, so it makes them sound dumber at a time when they probably wish they were coming across as clever.
Dumber, but also more sure of themselves. There is a reason people usually come back half an hour later and apologize for what they did when they were angry. It does have its uses, but open communication can also preclude it. For people who don’t tend to communicate freely, anger can help them finally say something they haven’t been saying. And quite a few people seem to work that way. Finally saying the thing they haven’t been saying can lead to solutions for their problem.
But anger can also lead to some pretty dumb things, and that seems to be the more common result.
I’m also autistic and also don’t really feel anger. I feel disappointed and/or frustrated with how people act, and I can feel a complete lack of goodwill towards people (not my baseline, I generally want to help people if I can). There are certainly people who deserve negative consequences for their actions and I don’t feel any compassion for Assad, for example. I probably wouldn’t piss on him if he were on fire, but I don’t feel angry with him (I might if I were Syrian and/or had more experience with the effects of his actions).
In my personal life, I don’t have any exes that I’m angry with (and I have some awful exes), it’s either confused, afraid of, pitying, neutral or positive.
Though tbh, I’m not sure if I just don’t recognize anger but do feel it. A coworker was sketchy about a tip we should have shared the other day, and I felt that it was wrong she pretended she hadn’t gotten a tip, and sad for her that she’d be deceptive about €0,65, but I wasn’t angry.
I do feel spiteful sometimes, which has got to be similar, but the only way I really express that is being extra polite to someone who’s being a dick so they feel guilty. It feels to me like I do that because I want them to be less rude in the future and I want to help induce the natural consequence of guilt that comes along with rudeness, but that could also just be my rationalizing it.
It’s far more pronounced on the internet anyways. People come here to vent. And the (social media) platforms incentivise them to do so, the way they’re build. I’d say it’s far less a thing in real life.
Anger and hate are not the same. Anger can be a healthy emotion to signal your (personal) boundaries. Not feeling hate is admirable and I think it’s entirely possible, sure.
I’d argue that hating concepts can lead to productive societal growth, and could even lead to personal growth depending on what is hated and for what reason.
For example, I hate capitalism, corruption, greed etc., which led me to learn more about alternatives that I would have not learned about otherwise. This could also go both ways, though, since hate for the exact same things have also led people down a fascist road, as human nature makes it so that we always want an enemy to blame. Whether that enemy is the ultra-wealthy or whether it’s the common man (ex: trans people, women, immigrants, etc.) is largely dictated by the media they consume and the people they surround themselves with.
Mob mentality is alive and well, and it’s up to all of us (as non-billionaires) to focus that energy in the correct places. Billionaires are the ones who started the culture war and keep feeding it, since that distracts normal people away from themselves, since they know that if they didn’t give the masses a group to hate (the common man), that they would find their own group to hate (billiomaires).
There’s a reason Luigi has so much support even though he allegedly murdered someone.
Economic instability will always lead to resentment over something and/or someone/group.
There’s a saying in therapy. If someone is sad all the time they have to learn to get mad, and if they are mad all the time they have to learn to be sad.
And what if you’re sad and mad all the time?
… Asking for a friend. Yeah… A friend. lol
Tell your friend to seek help.
This is terrible advice
There’s a saying in therapy “if you’re mad now just wait until your wife cheats on you”
No wait, that’s also just made up.
I don’t feel anger very often (and it’s very quick to vanish) and hate is extremely hard-won, but I have C-PTSD from childhood abuse and neglect. So I’m not your average person.
I don’t live with anger nor hate. I understand logically that all the subjects that frustate me are not changeable because of human nature. Like Politics for example, it frustates me the way every politician is always a little corrupt (or a lot sometimes) for some subject, but I understand that it’s not only about that one person, it’s also about human nature to want money and power and there is no way to change it, unless we put an alien or an AI in charge.
It’s healthy to live with a range of shifting emotions. Getting stuck in a cycle of anger, anxiety or depression may be due to not having some emotional needs met or tools to address them.
I was living pretty much entirely anger-free until 2 things happened:
- I started working at my job, where I was hired for my expertise and yet I am frequently interrupted mid-sentence, disrespected, or told to do things in ways that defy the foundations of my entire discipline (before anyone tells me to quit, I can’t, because of immigration-related reasons)
- One of my friends has fallen down the alt-right/X/Musk fanboyism pipeline and just about everything he rants is uninformed, reactionary, and rage-inducing. He spends too much of his time being angry about problems that don’t exist and spreads that anger everywhere
Saying that, I am autistic and often struggle to distinguish between anger, frustration, feeling hurt, and even sadness. I can isolate depression as a feeling fairly reliably though, because that is more numb and less passionate.
I dunno, what you’re saying seems ungenuine. you can’t name someone you hate because you don’t think about them?
Maybe you don’t understand what hate means. It doesn’t mean you’re obsessed with disliking them, it means intense dislike.
It doesn’t mean you spend time thinking about them. I hate(d) certain people in my life and if I was forced into a room with them I’d feel that feeling of intense dislike, but otherwise I don’t think about them. But I won’t pretend I don’t hate anyone just because I’m not actively discussing or thinking/feeling my feelings about that person
Hate is an extremely strong emotion. To me, it means basically that you wish they were dead. That I do not feel of anyone. However, I can’t say I intensely dislike anyone either. It’s not quite compatible with the way I see the world. Hating a person, to me, is like hating a hurricane or a volcano. It simply doesn’t make any sense.
Well that’s not the definition, so you’re probably not understanding because that’s not what most people mean.
Even so you can’t imagine why someone would want somebody else dead? Why someone would or could feel that way?
Hating a person, to me, is like hating a hurricane or a volcano.
Explain how, please. Because one is uncontrollable nature and the other has free will and chooses to do terrible things.
I’m not asking how you do it. I’m asking how your comparison makes any sense to you? I can understand not getting upset about things, choosing to, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t find them upsetting.
I don’t believe in free will or the self. That’s the difference for me here. Just like the hurricane couldn’t have done otherwise, I don’t think that a human could have either. I wouldn’t get angry at a bear attacking me in the forest either - that’s what bears do. Doesn’t mean I like it, or approve of it but I just don’t pretend as if they could have acted any other way.
I’m kind of enjoying the fact that your post is coming off increasingly angry.
