If You’re Angry and You Know It Close Your Phone
You’d be mad if you weren’t being torn asunder by your emotions in our current reality. If you haven’t had flushes of anger, irritability, sadness, anxiety, hopefulness, desperation, frustration, and anything in between over the last number of weeks I’d think you to be some sort of guru of emotional intelligence. We’ve all had our moments no doubt. But that’s all they should be; moments. They shouldn’t consume you, or lead you to make decisions based on the way you feel in the right now. You know how the old saying goes, make no promises when you’re happy and no decisions when you’re angry. Having your outbreaks of emotion is healthy, allowing these emotional ruptures to consume you isn’t.
The last number of weeks have seen an increase in anger and frustration online. The lockdown has resulted in people not getting their usual fix of a lot of things; social interaction and attention being two heavy hitters. This has caused, from where I’m standing, a spike in aggression and anger. I’m sure it wouldn’t difficult to find a study that links lower socializing with heightened aggression (Insert Name et al. here).
Over the last number of weeks, people have gotten sensationally angry over certain things. (The Keelings thing and people getting angry about 5K times spring to mind). What I noticed is people allowed themselves to be angered by things outside of their control, and indeed outside of their reality, for days on end. I understand how, in a moment of reaction, something might put the wrath of Zeus into your bones. But I have no idea how something so outside of your circle, which doesn’t affect the well-being of another person, could cause you to be angry for a prolonged period.
Of course, what’s happening here is a form of catharsis. None us have our usual method of blowing off steam (Which would usually be meeting up with friends and leaving the phone alone) so we need something to focus our frustration toward. We need an entity to feel angry at because there isn’t anything you can rationally blame for the situation we find ourselves in. I suppose, if you’re inclined toward religion, you could blame God for creating a virus, but even then, getting angry at your God puts you in his bad books, so you’d have to find another way to place some blame.
Being angry at other people for doing things that don’t affect you seems counterproductive to me. And seeing as everyone is seemingly obsessed with being productive at the minute, this is one of those rare opportunities to be more productive by actually doing less. You literally have to do more things to continue to be angry. Being angry takes effort. This is counter-productive, both for you and for the general atmosphere (Less angry people equals better craic). So if we do less things when we’re angry, if we decide not to tweet, or rant, or screenshot, or dissect everything that annoys us, if we decide to just keep on scrolling, we’ll be more productive because we’ll be wasting less time being angry. We can then use this spare time that we would have wasted on anger for more enjoyable endevours. Make sense?
I often find that we generally get annoyed by, or talk shit about things that we ourselves can’t do.
“He did in his fuck run it that quick”
“Who does she think she is trying to make music?”
I guarantee you’ll stop begrudging people who make it to the top of a mountain, the day you end up climbing one yourself. What I’m saying is, if something angers you, let is anger you and keep on moving. The moment you let it fester inside your head is the moment you start losing.
Drink your water as well,
