My friend Malaki and I had a podcast episode we recorded a few months back, and he reached out to me today to see if we could get together for a podcast session again. By the way, I’m 100% available for your podcast interviews so please accept this as an open invitation.
He is interested in discussing how to find peace and comfort… in a world where peace and comfort are threatened every day. So as a preview to the podcast episode I thought I’d share a particular viewpoint in this discussion: why I’m not angry.
Understandably many people are angry at the current political climate. I see that point of view. I also see a lot of posts that go like, “if you ask me why I’m so angry, I’ll ask you back: why aren’t you?” and the comment section for such a post is about being angry at the system to act today and now.
But SEPARATELY from that, let’s just look at anger itself minus the politics. Why do we get angry? I wrote about that in depth in this writing.
I like to illustrate points with spectrums so let’s also do that today. On one extreme we have events that don’t make us angry at all, like seeing a cat video online. On the other extreme we have events that INFURIATE us. But instead of just contrasting the two extremes, think of all the things that come in between (hey, that rhymes!).
Think of all these scenarios:
- Someone you don’t know bumps into you but doesn’t say sorry
- Someone is being obnoxious in a public place
- Your partner doesn’t look at you when you talk, they’re looking at their phone
- You’re play-fighting with your friends and they happen to hit you pretty hard
- Your parents talk behind your back amongst themselves and you overhear them
- Politics are impacting your life in a systemic way
As you place these events in the anger spectrum, now observe your feelings as you escalate through the line. What is the difference between the previous step of anger and the next step of anger?
What makes the maximum fury become so strong?
The answer has to do with your sense of self. When something impacts you in a negative way, it is likely to anger you. There’s more nuance we can add onto this, though. Politics may not always impact YOU or your demographic, but it can still make you angry. Why?
Your employer decides to lay off the most vulnerable part of your company with zero day notice. You’re not in that group. What about this is responsible for your anger? Billionaires made profit during covid while so many small businesses died (including my favorite ramen spot, Hachi Ramen in San Diego). But when you’re not a billionaire nor a small business owner, what about this is responsible for your anger?
It is when your beliefs are tested you get angry. The beliefs are an extension of your perception of your self. When you don’t have a strong preference on pizza toppings or Italian food in general, you don’t care much about pineapple pizza or breaking spaghetti in half. But to Italians it causes rage because it is a fundamental cultural belief that food must be respected in a certain way.
Tying this back into the real world, why am I not angry? I stopped being angry when I saw that I cannot possibly be right enough to hold that strongly onto a belief. I’m always either misinformed or not seeing things from the other person’s perspective. I know this because since I genuinely realized there is no reason to be angry, I retroactively studied all the instances where I was angry and found that 100% of the times I was just looking at things from my limited perspective.
Like any Korean I had a deeply held animosity for Japan and Japanese people. But it turns out, based on the political and cultural climate of Japan at the time Japan didn’t have a personal vendetta about Korea in particular; if it was another country that happened to be in the same location as Korea, Japan would have invaded that country.
Then why imperialism? It’s because that was what they exactly learned from Western powers in the 1850’s. A big fleet from the United States landed at Japan and forced them to either trade with them at a major loss, or just be raided with the ships that they’re seeing on their coastline. They learned by being the victim that an exploitative process using force works, really well.
Living in America as an Asian minority impacts me and the recent policies impact the people I work with. Why do these policies come to fruition in the first place, and moreover why is one side of the country actually happy about these policies? In a two party system where nobody is willing to meet in the middle, doesn’t it also make sense that regardless of the perceived reason the people on the other side of the political spectrum felt oppressed before?
It is in human nature to want to reciprocate. When someone does good to you you want to be good towards them. When someone harms you you want to harm them back. That’s the base and on top of that comes the perceived power differences and dynamics, but we’re transactional and reciprocal beings under the hood of this brain.
When we feel angry, we lose sight of the fact that the other party has the same reason to feel as angry as we do.
This kind of line of thought usually leads to accusations of cop-outs and being conveniently in the middle. And I agree, most of the people in the middle tend to not participate in any action. But I do my fair share of actual work in making sure I am helping the people impacted by changes in policy.
I am not angry. This means I won’t be vehemently calling out for changes and work intensely about things. But it also means I’ll be able to sustainably work on helping others regardless of who is in charge of a country. There is no stop-and-go cycle for me, and a big reason for this is, again, I am not angry. In fact the primary reason why I have a business is so I can circulate more money to those who are in need.
Another resistance to this line of thought is, “but the time to act is now, if you don’t resist to your fullest right now there might not be another chance”. Again, I agree with this. As did many of my ancestors who sacrificed their lives to fight for liberty. As did many Buddhist monks who sacrificed their lives to illustrate a point. As did many civil rights activists throughout history to ride the bus, vote, live in the same place as “normal” people did. But does all of that require anger?
Being brutally honest with you here, anger aside — I’m not sure if I have what it takes to act upon my principles when I’m at a life or death stake.
There are people who become catalysts for intense actions by placing themselves on the wheels of history. I am not forced to be in that spot right now, which I am conveniently taking advantage of by not putting myself in a life or death situation when I technically could. I could travel to the middle east. I could serve in the Ukrainian front lines. Or at least attempt to. But I’m in the comfort of my home writing this.
My ancestors thought everything would be great if only we had our country back. But we’re in the middle of the greatest political strife the country has ever seen. When civil rights activists died they hoped for a world with equality and yet we have systemic issues that festered throughout the times. History will keep repeating itself as long as the human conditions that follow human existence perseveres. But maybe we can go through the iteration a little bit happier than before.