Why We’re Primed For Anger Right Now

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I’m a lot angrier than I used to be since the start of the pandemic, and I suspect I’m not alone.

There are nine potential triggers for anger most people experience, and the one that inevitably catches us off-guard is being stopped. We are hard-wired to respond to any subversion of our forward progress by an outside party with an adrenaline dump and stress hormones.

This makes perfect sense when our primitive answers feared being immobilised by a bigger, stronger predator, but those same instincts now fire up when faced with a slow-moving queue, call-waiting muzak, or the moment the expected delivery time changes on our Uber Eats order.

It’s also triggered by systemic cultural oppression, by circumstances where we want things to change but can’t see a way out, and the denial of opportunities we’re convinced should be ours.

We’re living in an era full of anger right now. The pandemic thwarts our forward momentum in real and immediate ways, from lockdowns to thwarted plans to the general helplessness in the face of a large and overwhelming problem. Anger is less of a surge, and more a constant companion.

We’re wired to respond to the physiological triggers behind emotions in a ninety-second burst, after which our thoughts take over and we can either nurse the feeling or move on. Which leaves us with two modes of reaction to the surge of anger: reactive, and proactive.

Reactive approaches see you stuff the feeling down, nursing it as a form of icy rage, or seeking the release of an explosive outburst of verbal or physical rage.

The pro-active approach is holding on to your boundaries, acknowledging the rage is there and letting it go. It’s about reframing what you’re feeling and what it means, finding alternative ways to move forward, and disrupting the tendency to stew through tools like exercise, humour, focused breathing, and mindfulness.

Those initial ninety seconds of anger are instinctual, something you can’t avoid. Your nervous system is hard-wired for it, warning you there’s a potential problem that you need to address.

But it’s also an invitation: how will you respond once the ninety seconds are over? Will you slip into the easy, reactive follow-through or find a pro-active way out of the being halted in place? Will you stew or find an alternate route?

Some recommended reading if you’ve noticed a growing trend towards anger or irritability in recent months: Unfuck Your Anger: Using Science To Understand Your Frustration, Rage, and Forgiveness, by Dr Faith Harper.

Downgrading Instead Of Replacing

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Me, three weeks ago: “Time to replace my phone. The battery isn’t quite enough to get through a busy day without charging, and everything’s running slow.” I resented the expense, and the time required to switch everything over, but it felt like a necessary upgrade.

Then I went through and cleaned off apps I didn’t want to transfer to a new phone. It cleared off half the screen. I followed it up by going minimalist on other apps as well. I went through them, one by one, and queried whether I was getting any value out of having them on my phone. The results were surprising:

  • No more mail app (I don’t answer emails on the phone, only read and ignore them);
  • No more IMDB (I only ever look things up on my couch, and the computer is right there);
  • No more YouTube (often used for streaming music during the day, and easily replaced by less distracting alternatives)
  • No more Chrome app (I still have a browser, but not one that remembers my bookmarks and search history, giving me a work-around way of accessing social media like Twitter and Facebook)
  • No more Instagram (I schedule and post images from Facebook’s business manager, mostly).
  • No more RSS reader (I never remember to check it on the phone, only on the desktop).

The short list of things that survive the cut: ereader apps; messaging services used by my closest friends; check-in apps for COVID tracking; the handful of apps I used to run Brain Jar Press and the long-form aspects of my web presence; a handful of apps for tracking eating and health.

The sole new app added: a music app for streaming tracks without playing videos, so I didn’t backslide and download YouTube again.

The phone became a useful tool, rather than a place to waste time, and the battery rarely dips below 60% now. No need to replace it unless I backslide and load all the deleted apps again, but in three weeks I’ve lived without everything and gradually weaned myself off constant checking.

I’ve never resented my phone less.

And if I do want to waste time on my phone, there’s still a backlist of ebooks and comics that need to be read. Which hardly feels like wasting time at all, compared to the other options.

Two Components of a Big Return

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The biggest story in professional wrestling right now is the return of CM Punk. A man who walks down to the ring to talk, and gets a standing ovation from ten thousand fans that lasts through a commercial break. It’s the kind of buzz that wrestling hasn’t got since it’s dwindling heyday in the late nineties, when two major companies fought for supremacy, and household names like Steve Austin and The Rock were consolidating their status as superstars.

Part of the reason fans are coming unglued: this return wasn’t meant to happen. Seven years ago Punk left the biggest game in town—the WWE—after mismanagement and ignored health warnings left him burnt out on the business. He was at the top of his game, but he wasn’t happy as a wrestler anymore, and especially unhappy with the way WWE treated him, frequently suggesting he was too weird, too alternative, too small, too difficult.

Punk did a lot of things in his time off: trained to fight for the UFC; wrote comic books; acted in small films. He sued the WWE’s doctors for repeatedly mismanaging his health, including a failure to diagnose and treat a potentially deadly staff infection. He got into a legal battle with his former best friend, whose Podcast was hit by a counter-suit by the WWE doctor for Punk’s comments about his time with the company.

And while people leave wrestling and come back all the time, from retirements that don’t stick to short-term movie gigs that take wrestlers away from the ring, Punk gave every impression of sticking to his guns. He didn’t do many fan events, rarely entertained questions about a return, and leaned into his reputation for being honest with the fans when he said, “I’m done.”

Then, suddenly, he wasn’t.

The rumours started a month ago: he was signing a contract with the two-year-old federation, AEW. They hinted at it on AEW’s major shows, and on Punk’s social media, and fans were cautiously excited. 90% percent sure there was a comeback afoot, but still never 100% sure. I’d stopped watching wrestling at the start of the year, because following a moderately large company like WWE or AEW means a) a subscription fee to access their content, and b) committing to watching several hours of television a week to follow the product.

I fired up my subscription to AEW again on the strength of the CM Punk rumour, and I still braced myself for disappointment if it was all hype.

Then he debuted. All he does for the first five minutes of his return is walk to the ring while the crowd goes berserk, and if you’re a wrestling fan, it’s goddamned riveting. People cried. I cried. The impossible had taken place. AEW pulled their biggest TV rating ever, which led to their biggest pay-per-view buy ever.

Punk’s return is a phenomenal success, and I’m a nineteen-year-old wrestling fan all over again, nerdily invested in the action.

But the thing worth noting about it: this isn’t a return you could manufacture out of nothing. Punk and AEW are capitalising on the circumstances available to them, picking their time and place to maximise the effects. They’re definitely working to make this as big as possible, but the organic heart of it—a mistreated wrestler with enormous fan investment who walked away on principle, then stayed away for seven years with nary a hint of making a comeback—that heart… that context… isn’t something you can manufacture.

None of this should take away from the talent of the people involved: CM Punk is fantastic at what he does, and the folks behind AEW are doing a damn good job of building a credible challenger for the WWE.

But it’s also a reminder—talent is only part of a massive success, the rest is capitalising on the circumstances and making the best use of the context in which a project debuts. I know from experience that launching a book in the early days of social media of 2007, when old friends were rapidly connecting and catching up on one-another’s’ lives, was a very different experience to launching books in 2021 when Twitter and Facebook are a drag on our attention.