On Anger

I’ve been watching old seasons of the TV show Battle Bots on Max with my 6 year old. I tell people it’s because he likes to watch it, but the reality is, most of the time it’s because I want to watch robots break pieces off of each other while people yell and scream. All the appeal of prize fighting with none of the CTE. Anyway, as we’ve been working our way through the seasons we recently hit the COVID/2020 season. Suddenly there were no spectators, people were in small clusters and separated by big pieces of lucite, they were learning how to conduct interviews over Zoom in real time, and everyone was wearing masks. It did not bring back happy memories to suddenly be thrust back into that world. But one thing I found interesting about, looking back dispassionately from 2025, is that suddenly, everyone on the show was angry. There weren’t any (televised) arguments about masks/distancing/etc, but in the COVID season contestants were abruptly arguing with the judges, the commentators, and their opponents in a way that they hadn’t in any of the previous seasons. Stressful times amp up anger and it needs an outlet.

My wife and I have observed, and worked on, the fact that we tend to argue with each other more when we are stressed about other issues—- the kids are acting up, money is tight, other family members have difficult needs. We can’t yell at the bank, or the three year old, or grandma, so we end up yelling at each other (and, again, then talking about it and working on it so we don’t keep doing that in the future). Anger at things outside of our control wants to find an outlet in things that we can control, whether or not that is fair.

I’ve been thinking about that over the last two weeks as various new political realities unfold across America. I’ll keep my own politics out of this blog since that’s not what this project is about, and since it would be very easy to backtrack from this blog to my employer, but I think regardless of political persuasion we can agree that things have been stressful for the last few weeks. Earlier this week, I was in a real spiral about the abrupt cutting of funding to USAID— you are welcome to whatever political opinion you want to have about the justification for that, but hopefully we can agree that it is bad that people that were receiving healthcare and nutrition suddenly aren’t. Specifically, I read an article about the fact that, in the few days after funding was cut to PEPFAR, a minimum of 300 babies now had AIDS that would otherwise not have. This made me angry. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do with that anger that could do anything about the situation. I responded by getting in a big argument with a friend of mine who is a big supporter of Elon Musk, to the point that I’m not sure our friendship, which I valued, is repairable. I’m not sure if I there was anything gained from this argument, but I am very confident that our argument will have no impact on USAID funding or babies with AIDS.

You can of course see this same phenomenon over and over again in just the last few years. Many people were very very angry about COVID restrictions and, since you can’t yell at a virus, some of them ended up channeling that anger into attacks on Target employees. Many people were very very angry about civilian deaths in Gaza over the last year and, since Bibi Netanyahu doesn’t care what they think, they took it out on university property (in a few anecdotal cases). Looking back at it dispassionately, what is the net benefit of all that anger?

So, what is the solution? Here are some things that I’ve found help me (imperfectly of course, since I was yelling at people about Elon Musk just a few days ago). I find some small thing I can do that contributes in some kind of meaningful way to solving the problem—- I set up a few small monthly donations to organizations that I think are doing some good about things. I don’t believe those donations are going to make everything be the way I want it to be, but when I feel overwhelmed I can look at my bank statement and know that I supplied a few billable minutes for some paralegal somewhere that might be a part of making things a little better. I then make an effort to get myself out of the online spaces that contribute to my anger. Yesterday, I went with a friend to see the movie Companion (two stars, not life changing but a perfectly good use of two hours on a Wednesday evening) instead of doomscrolling. And if I can’t get myself out of those online spaces, I try to engage in conversations there that will help people instead of contributing to their anger—- I spend a lot of time posting about moments of positivity, and when I did find myself sucked into an online argument about the state of things today, I did everything I could to keep it focused on civics (what our representatives can actually do about things) instead of ideology (what we wish our representatives can do/what we should yell at our representatives about their inability to do).

And I exercise. On Tuesday, after I had already invested 20 minutes in doomscrolling and didn’t see a way to stop if I kept sitting on the couch, I told my wife I was going for a run, grabbed the dog, and took off for a few miles in the February drizzle. This complicated getting the kids their dinner and probably won’t make a difference in terms of my marathon fitness in a few months, but it helped me in that moment a lot more than texting articles to my Musk fan friend would have. At the end of that run, I felt genuinely better and more connected to the immediate world around me, and that feeling stuck with me for the rest of the day.

That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing with this project. If you’re new here, I’m training to run 5 half marathons in 4 weeks this July on a roadtrip across the country, and I’m doing that to raise money for the National Diaper Bank Network. This project gets me motivated to exercise almost every day, and it gives me a sense that I’m doing something that will have a small, measurable impact.. If you’ve made it this far and you’d like to be a part of things, it would be great if you clicked the “Donate” button at the top of this page and kicked in even a few bucks. If you don’t want to help my project, I’d encourage you to find one that you do want to get involved in and find some small way to contribute. I promise you, you’ll feel better later!