We’re back on the ego series this installment and contemplating anger.
If you watched my YouTube video cycling through 5 countries in a day, there was a moment where a woman decided I was the worst person on earth.
I had used the bin for the pharmacy she worked at to put away the waste from my lunch and some rubbish I’d found in the car park.
For some reason, this was truly terrible for her.
I was finding it a bit odd and didn’t really feel like emptying her bin to find a further away one, so I asked why it mattered. She totally lost her shit and screamed at me a lot so I emptied her bin and found a further away one.
Her anger didn’t really affect me. I was a bit bemused. I pootled off on my bike leaving her blood boiling and a terrible day stewing in her toxic emotions.
It is easy to look at such an odd scenario and ask what is wrong with her?
Why did she feel so much emotion over something so insignificant?
Totally crazy.
The fact she even lectured me about logic makes it all even more surreal as she had lost hers.
Honestly though, as a human, we are all completely bananas.
I’ll show you why.
Anger is a result of bad principles
We all have our interpretation of the world and what is right and wrong.
What we are owed and not owed.
What we deserve and expect.
Yet most of this just isn’t true.
When we feel anger, it happens when we are expecting something to happen but it isn’t happening.
Instead of calmly accepting the current scenario we lose our composure and let the events of the world get to us.
We tell ourselves that an injustice is being caused against us and we need to fight. Yet most of the time there is nothing to fight and we are only beating ourselves up.
In my story above the woman firmly believes that the bin is only for her business waste and not for others to use. Any use of the bin was stealing from them and against her principles. Getting angry caused some inconvenience for me in the moment whilst also just as much inconvenience for her running around the car park like a lunatic. But this principle made her day and her emotional state genuinely worse.
But my own anger has good reasons
If I have an important business meeting to get to or a special family event, a missed train can really ruin my day.
If I miss my train because of poor time management I might be sad or frustrated at myself or even angry. But it is generally accepted quickly and I move on.
Yet when my train is late and I miss my connection I am understandably angered. I expected a train, I brought a ticket and they went and screwed it up. My work and livelihood or precious family time is at stake and I counted on them and feel abused.
Except what’s the benefit of feeling anger at a train company?
No one will feel my wrath.
If you think about the train delay it was probably a technical or environmental fault that happened or possibly someone was incompetent. But no one at the train company decided to deliberately mess up my day and they are busy enough trying to sort things out as it is.
Having an extra customer trying to ruin their day isn’t going to do any use. If I do find a train person to shout at, they probably weren’t responsible. Thus they would either:
A - Apologize and treat me like a toddler
B - Get angry at me
Either of which would just make me feel worse…
Is my anger logical?
I think I’m logically getting angry because the train company is harming my ability to have happiness. But actually, happiness is an option right in front of me.
I can choose kindness to the unfortunate or stupid train company and be happy with the new situation. Or I can prepare for battle and start a fight down a path that I believe must be taken to ultimately result in my happiness. But probably it causes lots of stress until I eventually move on.
With the time delay, I could focus on useful activities like writing or learning a language on my phone or helping other travelers. It is really my priority to just accept whatever my new train time is and get on with enjoying my life.
That is logic.
Stop being the hero of your story
Our ego protects us and tells us we are the hero in any situation. It quickly tells us why we are great and why others are the evil force against us.
Noticing that we can also be wrong or that there is no evil force to fight is crucial. It can help us notice our ego clouding our thoughts and seek the truth of the situation.
What about life and death?
During the Iraq war, Colonel Sassaman’s battalion was considered one of the most impressive in the US forces. During the initial “Liberation of Iraq” removing Saddam Hussein’s regime unfortunately innocent civilians were killed and of course, Saddam’s army contained good men on the wrong side, but this is the truth of war.
Proudly, Sassaman had lost none of his troops during the liberation. Afterward, he worked closely with local communities to establish a new democracy and peace. He was helping to run local elections, rebuild communities and foster trust in the fragile situation.
One day insurgents blew up one of his vehicles, killing one of his men. Sassaman and the battalion were angered by this loss of US life. They had expected to go to war without losing any of their men but sadly this is not the truth of war.
They struggled to accept this injustice and losing their clean record.
For them and the Iraqis in their area, everything changed. He believed violence can only be stopped with ‘organized violence’.
Organized violence
The Americans practically imprisoned the Iraqis in their villages with patrolled barbed wire fencing and an ID system. Anyone that crossed the fence was shot.
They sequentially and repeatedly broke into everyone's home and searched for weapons, turning the inhabitant’s personal possessions upside down. They arrested nearly all the men and treated them as insurgents, anyone that resisted was shot.
In Iraqi culture, men believe they must defend their honor and their families. If someone breaks into your house and rifles through your wife’s and daughter’s underwear drawers and then arrests you and your sons for no reason, you get pissed.
A mostly innocent village that previously wasn’t overjoyed with America turned into a boiling pot of hatred. The war that was almost over was only just beginning.
Organized Lies
“Organized violence” was Colonel Sassaman’s way of lying to himself. It justified his actions as heroic and rightful whilst painting the Iraqi’s actions as those of an evil enemy who deserved such treatment.
Of course, a good and noble man like Sassaman wouldn’t behave like that normally. After-all, calm and peaceful actions are not the truth of war.
The Iraqis followed the same simple logic with both sides descending further and deeper into justified hatred.
Under this analysis, you can see how extremist organizations like IS were born.
(If you’re interested, this is a great BBC documentary on the Iraq war.)
Transcending anger
There are endless tales from life where an event happens that someone didn’t want. They get angry and try to right a wrong. They make their own life worse.
The famous sayings are accurate:
An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind.
Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
Yet every time we feel our anger is justified and we hold onto it preciously. With our anger, we cling preciously to the world we wanted that no longer exists. To deny our anger is to say that what happened was right.
Telling someone to not be angry feels like telling them that what happened was good and they should accept it gladly. They are blind to the fact that they are harming themselves and those around them.
They think they must walk through this corridor of pain and hardship and do not see that love is harder.
Rightfully obsessed
The mothers who tragically lose a son or daughter in a health and safety error with window latches or a drunken car crash are understandably angered. Their years of subsequent campaigning to ensure this never happens again is something they would have never done before.
They say that if just one life is saved, everything they do is justified. But if they donated to effective charities they would save 10x more lives and 10x their time and money.
The sad truth is their obsession will never bring their child back.
The harder we argue we are right, the more we distance ourselves from seeing reality. Justice is not always in the form we want it to be when what we want can’t happen.
(Mo Gawdat lost his son in a simple surgical accident - his book on happiness is worth a read)
Understanding ourselves
It is easy to think we are not like the lady fretting over a few sandwich packets thrown innocently into her business’s bin. Yet 80% of drivers experience road rage.
How many of us think that drivers slower than us are incapable and drivers faster than us are wreckless?
I’m sure we all get annoyed at canceled trains or flights and would feel anger if our friend or child was killed.
Most people are closer to the angry bin lady obsessed with the world being her way than they think. They are much closer to her than to a Zen monk who lets the world be the way it is, without judgment.
When we see events as unjust, our fangs come out.
Stop being dumb
Anger is a lack of logic.
If you care about yourself and look through your feelings and what you want to achieve you will find that anger isn’t the way.
I see angry people and feel sorry for them. I feel sorry for their lack of wisdom to understand they could have a better life. I feel sadness for the turmoil they put themselves through doing nothing but hurting themselves.
If you can accept that we feel anger out of principle, you can move forwards to trying to understand it.
There are plenty of times when feeling anger makes sense. Women in the US are being told that they no longer have rights to their bodies, for example.
The point is to not stop feeling emotions. But to understand that emotions do not deserve unquestioned control of our actions.
A difficult situation does not always have an obvious answer.
We must have faith that there might be more sensible ways of responding than what our emotions immediately tell us.
Responding with anger will almost definitely be wrong. It is our own version of the ‘organized violence’ lie that Colonel Sassaman believed.
Reaching our goal of a better situation and a happy life requires openness to ideas and detachment from our reactive nature.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself:
What makes you angry?
What situation did I expect that did not happen?
Why did I want that situation so badly?
What does my anger achieve?
Why?
Why?
Why?
Why?
Why?
What assumptions am I making that I deserve to be angry?
What is the opposite of these biggest assumptions?
Now the situation I wanted cannot happen, what is the best situation that I can create instead?
Finding time and space in an emotional situation is not intuitive or easy. But it is essential if we actually care about our happiness.
Our ego lies to us and feeds us stories of heroism that ironically cause actions that are the opposite of heroic.
Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from the inside.
We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us.
But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.
Forgive, Edward. Forgive...no one is born with anger.
And when we die, the soul is freed of it.
But now, here, in order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did, and why you no longer need to feel it.
Mitch Albom
Great one Sam!
I think you are mistaking anger for rage. There is a big difference! Anger helps us hold healthy boundaries. The lady with your bin incident has likely had her boundaries crossed many times and you were down line of what her original anger couldn't facilitate i.e. a boundary. What I'm seeing in many places is rage not anger - you correctly named road rage. If we don't learn to differentiate then we demonise anger and lose our ability to hold boundaries - people are already lacking in the skills for this - which is why rage is created. Anger is in the here and now, in the immediate situation, to help us hold a boundary. I think demonising anger is really dangerous because it creates more rage! Rage is from the past and comes at us with more force than is required for the situation because our attempt at anger in the past has failed - it builds up through many weeks/months/years and when a situation arises that reminds us we haven't been able to hold our boundary the (usually unwitting) person crossing that boundary gets all of the build up of rage, not just the immediate anger. We could think about everything that's going in little and big wars everywhere as mis placed, old rage. Anger is healthy and essential! I would really recommend reading the book 'Anger, rage and relationship by Sue Parker Hall. I also have a substack and as yet haven't written anything - this feels like something I could really write about so thank you for the inspiration!