random bouts of rage

i think many men (not women) on this planet are primarily characterized by one of two emotions. you’re either anger based or horny based. that is to say, what emotion do people use to power their actions most commonly? for the purposes of this post, we’ll focus on the prior.

when you’re a kid growing up, it’s natural to seek the approval of your peers. it’s a fundamental social skill that we carry as adults, and satiating this social hunger is, perhaps not surprisingly, a natural wrapper around many actions we perform. why do we have jobs? because we want to not look like bums? because we don’t want to disappoint our parents? because we’re doing what we want to do? yeah, fat chance pal. get in the cube like the rest of us.

when you fail to meet the expectations of your peers or your mentors, how do you handle that situation? a common way is anger or rage. and it could be external OR internal. you could be pissed off at yourself for not living up to someone else’s standards. or someone could be projecting standards on you that are unreasonable, and you could be pissed off at them instead. it goes both ways. are either strictly necessary as thoughts to have or emotions to feel? that gets more into emotional processing, the validity of thoughts, how can any thought be “necessary”, etc.

as a kid, i was definitely anger coded. i would lash out at situations that weren’t immediately trivial (in terms of schooling AND socially) and be commonly frustrated and vulgar. i had to grow out of it, and i eventually did (many people i know today are surprised to find out i was a delinquent when i was younger.) but every now and then, there are times when that external form of rage takes back over, in seemingly trivial situations. like my internet disconnecting for reasons inexplicable.

is my internet disconnecting worth getting mad about? in this case, i had put some 15 or so minutes into a ffxiv dungeon and i cut out before i could get the rewards at the end, so i was pissed and i just closed the game while noting expletives to my friends in discord. quick emotional processing, close the game, fuck off, done. this was a process that was (maybe surprisingly) hard to internalize as an adolescent/teenager.

as men grow up, i think we tend more towards the internalized anger. going home and drinking yourself into the night after you get back from work pissed off at your boss, or self-deprecation to the point of nonchalance at the mention of it. one of those is more extreme than the other, but i digress.

when i was younger, anger was how i expressed that i didn’t know what i was doing or didn’t know how to handle whatever was happening at the time. and as shown by my internet disconnecting today, it seems that’s still my go-to way of channeling my anger. but i know plenty of people who don’t use anger as a motivator at all when figuring out the game of life.

i guess what i’m trying to say is, anger doesn’t necessarily need to be a bad thing. emotions in general aren’t necessarily bad things. they’re mainly fuel used to power actions that result in things that are meant for the emotion. you can use anger to give yourself strength to do something you wouldn’t normally be able to do, or you can use sadness to etch solemnity into your soul. it’s when you get it twisted, to nobody’s surprise, that it gets weird.

thanks for reading today’s post.
let’s try to feel less afraid to feel this week.