They're Taking Everything From Us. Don't Let Them Take This, Too.

Hang on to it.

Photo by Michael Shannon on Unsplash

Greta Thunberg has the right kind of anger.

The tech bros don’t.

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.

A MAGA senator recently told her own constituents they’re going to die anyway, so it doesn’t matter if the government cuts their healthcare and social support networks. Then she told us all to embrace Jesus. Meanwhile, genocidal drones bomb genuine activists for trying to end a starvation campaign while soldiers fire on journalists, and they’re held up as the good guys. Our politicians ridicule and even assault their own constituents who dare to ask them tough questions. And if they don’t do the assaulting themselves, they have security forces tase and remove protestors who challenge their ignorance and cruelty.

Even on the smallest, most mundane level, like trying to get a new printer to work (yes, that’s me), we’re reminded of the fact that we live in a system designed to extract wealth from us while delivering cheap goods and services that barely function, or don’t function at all. We’re told to meditate this away with gratitude and mindfulness, and when we can’t, we’re told it’s our fault.

We’re not allowed to act like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or MTG when we get angry. Watch what happens when you do.

There’s a lot going on in the world now that should make us deeply angry, and yet many of us are brainwashed into believing that anger isn’t good for us, that we should cleanse ourselves of anger with a smile.

I’m here to tell you otherwise.

I got receipts.

Here’s one of the simplest truths in the world. If you’re rich, if you come from a rich family, if you’re in charge of a big company, if you hold political power, you’re allowed to get angry. It’s practically expected of you. But you can only get angry at the wrong things, like social justice and equality.

Or long lines at Starbucks…

Despite all these documented examples of highly successful entrepreneurs thriving 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.

For example, 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." If you’re Greta Thunberg, focused anger at war crimes and genocide gets you bombed by drones.

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. In other words, expressing anger is a crucial part of your mental health.

As long as you get angry at the right things…

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." Their 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.

They pay to avoid feeling an emotion that can help them solve problems and find solutions during emergencies…

The Texas 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. As the study confirmed, happiness or amusement makes someone less likely to take action. It has a way of making you more complacent.

Anger also makes you more aware.

Here’s something else:

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. So, MAGA doesn’t have a monopoly on anger—just hate. Anger isn’t the same thing as hate. You can express anger toward someone and their actions without calling for their extermination.

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, especially in the short term. You eventually need a break from anger, but it’s a powerful creative catalyst.

All of these studies point toward the idea that anger isn’t something to avoid. It’s something we need to learn how to harness. Properly managed, anger serves a lot of valuable roles. But by trying to eliminate anger, or by reserving it only for the elite, anger has instead become a toxin.

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 someone’s disregarding federal or international courts to commit crimes, it makes you angry. If you express that anger effectively, they pay attention.

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 strategic anger during confrontations reflects more emotional intelligence—not less. 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..." It takes more maturity and more self control to show someone a certain amount of anger, instead of simply hiding it.

So, there you go.

To sum up:

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. They can use anger to direct hate at vulnerable and marginalized groups, and that’s the wrong kind of anger.

It's not healthy to stifle your anger. It's not healthy to hide it behind a smile. We’re not being told to hide our anger because it’s good for us. We’re being told this because it makes us easier to ignore, or control.

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.

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.

For the last four years, the public didn’t get angry enough.

The ones who got angry are in charge now, and they’re taking everything from us. They’re taking our medicine, our vaccines, our healthcare, our schools, our retirement, our food, our housing, our jobs, even our weather forecasts. They’re going on television weekly and telling us our children have too many toys, too many school supplies, and that we should just shut up about tax breaks for the super rich, because we’re all gonna die anyway, so we don’t matter.

This is what happens when you don’t get angry enough. This is what happens when you let someone tell you anger is bad, that you should just go around smiling all the time no matter what happens.

Even if you’ve lost faith in politics, I get it. You’ve got to put your time and energy where it counts now, but don’t let anyone take your anger. You have a right to get angry when someone hurts you or someone you care about. Don’t let your anger cloud your judgment. But do let your anger guide your mind to the most appropriate, most effective course of action in any situation.

Anger is a survival tool. It's natural.

Don't let them take your anger.

Listen to it.

Use it.