Are You Angry? It Means You're Smart.
Are You Angry? It Means You're Smart.
Joy doesn't work.
Steve Jobs once told his daughter she smelled like a toilet.
Apparently, he was just hazing her.
Still, that's not very nice.
Is it?
In the early days of Microsoft, Bill Gates frequently belittled his team, sending emails in the middle of the night telling them things like, "This is the stupidest piece of code ever written." Gates swore all the time during meetings. He was especially fond of the f-bomb. On weekends, he skulked around parking lots to see who was putting in overtime. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos nurtured a "notoriously confrontational culture" at Amazon, where it was normal to call coworkers lazy, incompetent, and just plain stupid. All of these guys went out of their way to forge corporate environments that thrived on conflict and animosity.
Joe Biden is famous for his secret temper.
That's the thing about all these powerful types. Their defenders offer endless excuses, even praise for angry dudes and girlbosses as long as their negative emotions and outbursts drive profit and fuel the endless growth economy.
If it doesn't...
Despite all these documented examples of highly successful entrepreneurs flourishing on anger, the influencer class pushes an entirely different playbook on everyone else. They tell us to smile all the time. They tell us that anger, outrage, sarcasm, and criticism don't get you anywhere. When you act like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, but you put that energy into something like climate change or social justice, what happens?
It lands you in jail.
Roger Hallam is currently serving a 5-year prison term for nonviolent climate protest. The judge told him he had "crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic." Those of us who still advocate for public health are often accused of being "obsessed" with diseases and told to move on with our lives. If you're obsessed with making money, it's a good thing.
You're only allowed to be "concerned" about the future.
That's how it works.
There's a deep fissure of truth in the middle of this mess. Psychologists have found that a healthy amount of anger is good for you.
A 2023 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology comments on a recent trend in research on mental and emotional health to move away from happiness as the ultimate goal. Instead, "a mix of emotions, which includes negative states, results in the best outcomes" in terms of overall life satisfaction. Americans don't want that, though. They want to stay happy all the time, and it's making them miserable. It's leading them toward more spending, more drug use, and more violence.
Emotions aren't just feelings. Your brain generates emotions in response to different situations. They provide you with information that you're supposed to act on. When you suppress your anger and fear, it has terrible consequences for your mental health. It also leads to poor choices with longterm consequences. Your body knows you're lying to yourself, even if you don't.
A team of psychologists at Texas A&M University studied anger in particular "because it is frequently discussed as an emotion that should be regulated or controlled and is hedonically aversive." A 2013 study in the Journal of Happiness Studies found that people would even pay to avoid feeling anger, sometimes even more than they would pay to feel pleasant emotions.
The Texax A&M study ran experiments with college students, who finished more puzzles and more challenging ones when they felt anger compared to feelings of amusement, desire, or sadness. Anger made them stick with harder puzzles longer. It also made them better at video games in hard mode. Finally, angry students were more likely to sign a petition against an unjustified tuition increase. Happiness or amusement has a way of making you more complacent.
Anger also makes you more aware.
Things get more interesting:
Anger makes you politically active. The A&M team also looked at voting behavior, running a statistical analysis on voter surveys in different states. In the last two presidential elections, anger predicted voting activity better than other emotions, including fear. As they observed, anger was "higher among those who voted," regardless of who they voted for. Americans voted for Trump out of anger, but they also voted for Clinton and Biden out of anger, too.
Anger also makes you more creative.
A 2020 study in PsyCh Journal found that anger stimulates original thought. As the authors write, "the induction of an anger emotion promotes an individual's divergent thinking more than that of a joy emotion" when it comes to creative problem-solving. An earlier 2010 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology observed that someone with high emotional maturity "exhibited greater fluency, originality, and flexibility after receiving angry rather than neutral feedback, whereas those with low EM were less creative..." According to another study in the same journal, anger also boosts the formation of new ideas, at least in the short term. Eventually, your mind needs a break.
Anger also serves an important social function.
It gets people's attention.
A 2011 study by Aaron Sell found that anger offers "a mechanism through which individuals recalibrate other people's perception of their own worth and the value placed on their opinions and desires." Specifically, they use anger "to bargain for better treatment."
If nobody's listening to you, it makes you angry. If someone's taking advantage of you, it makes you angry. If someone's hurting you, it makes you angry. If you express that anger effectively, they pay attention to you.
Anger gets results.
A 2012 study by Brett Ford and Maya Tamir observed that people are more likely to listen when you express the right amount of anger. Using anger during confrontations reflects more emotional intelligence. As they write, "people who prefer to feel anger when confronting others tend to be higher in emotional intelligence, whereas people who prefer to feel happiness in such contexts tend to be lower..."
So, there you have it.
Anger gets attention. Anger gets results. Anger makes you more creative. Anger makes you better at solving problems and overcoming challenges. Anger predicts a higher level of emotional maturity and intelligence.
Anger makes you smarter.
It has to be the right amount of anger, at the right time, for the right purpose. We all know that too much anger, like any emotion, can cloud your judgment. It can lead to counterproductive action. Politicians can exploit our anger and harness it to serve their interests.
There's a difference between getting angry and losing your temper or lashing out. You can get angry and stay in control.
You can use your anger strategically.
That's the thing to practice.
When you get angry, that's a sign that something has gotten between you and your goals. So the answer is to figure out how to deal with the obstacle, whether it's a thing or a person. Conveying your emotions can help.
It's not healthy to stifle your anger. It's not healthy to hide it behind a smile. As far as the super rich go, they clearly don't have a problem with anger.
They get angry all the time.
Study after study lends support to what's known as the anger activism model (AAM). Citizens engage when they feel a sense of moral anger over injustice. They actually do things like donate, vote, or devote their time and energy to a cause.
Yes, there's a downside.
Whether you're angry or not, doing the right thing takes a lot out of you. It's easier to take the path of least resistance, even if that path hurts everyone.
This is probably why neoliberal flunkies spend so much time and energy wagging their fingers at doomers and fearmongers and exhorting us to stay calm while pursuing joy. It makes everyone easy to manage, easy to ignore, and easy to kill.
So, watch out when someone bashes their opponents simply for using anger to get things done. They'll try to tell you that anger doesn't work, when in fact anger does work. That's precisely why they don't want their opponents to get angry. They don't want to listen to you or treat you with the respect you deserve. If you never get angry, it means nothing ever has to change.
Neoliberals love it when vibes displace action.
It's really something when you listen to the most affluent individuals blame activists and advocates for getting angry, telling them it doesn't work, when they're the ones who continually fail to listen or do what's necessary to build a healthier society. Our anger isn't the problem. It's the complacency and status quo civility they constantly demand from the public, and it never leads anywhere.
Imagine if the public actually, genuinely got angry at the right things for once, and managed to turn that anger into sustained, productive action. We might actually have a plan to deal with an overheating planet. We might actually have better vaccines and treatments for diseases, and plans to prevent new ones from turning into pandemics. Instead, we get told to smile all the time while the world burns.
Anger doesn't happen out of nowhere. It arises in response to specific situations, especially the obstruction of goals and those moments when we witness unfairness or injustice. Living things evolved an anger response to protect themselves from threats. Although it doesn't exactly feel good, studies have shown that the right amount of anger clarifies your thinking, boosts cortisol and adrenaline, and generally gives you the power and sense of agency required in a given moment.
Anger is a survival tool. It's natural.
Don't let them take your anger.
Use it.
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