When I look at the kinds of articles people post on social media and the comments under them, it feels like there’s an overwhelming amount of hate and anger in the world - or at least among the people posting and commenting. (Maybe it’s just that non-angry people don’t spend much time in this kind of spaces.)
In contrast, when I think about my own life, I realize that I’m almost never angry. I feel many other negative emotions, sure, but anger isn’t one of them, and even when it arises it’s usually quite short-lived. I can’t even name a single person I hate - neither in my personal life nor in the media. I simply don’t spend time dwelling on people I’m not interested in or being angry at the world for not meeting my expectations.
This makes me wonder: is my experience rare or unusual? Or is hate and anger simply overrepresented in the media because those emotions motivate people to engage, making them seem far more widespread than they actually are?
I’m trying to understand rather than criticize. I can’t take credit for not being angry because whatever tha skill is doesn’t translate into other things like anxiety. I’m anxious about equally trivial things and I can’t help myself. I guess I’m just glad I don’t need to deal with this constant anger too.
I’m Autustic and don’t seem to have anger. “Frustrated” is similar, I got that one just fine, but anger doesn’t seem to come up. I don’t seem to have a bunch of them, though. So, I have definitely noticed the same thing. The internet is so full of anger, and it mostly just seems to serve to temporarily compromise the intellect of the person feeling it, so it makes them sound dumber at a time when they probably wish they were coming across as clever.
Dumber, but also more sure of themselves. There is a reason people usually come back half an hour later and apologize for what they did when they were angry. It does have its uses, but open communication can also preclude it. For people who don’t tend to communicate freely, anger can help them finally say something they haven’t been saying. And quite a few people seem to work that way. Finally saying the thing they haven’t been saying can lead to solutions for their problem.
But anger can also lead to some pretty dumb things, and that seems to be the more common result.
I’m also autistic and also don’t really feel anger. I feel disappointed and/or frustrated with how people act, and I can feel a complete lack of goodwill towards people (not my baseline, I generally want to help people if I can). There are certainly people who deserve negative consequences for their actions and I don’t feel any compassion for Assad, for example. I probably wouldn’t piss on him if he were on fire, but I don’t feel angry with him (I might if I were Syrian and/or had more experience with the effects of his actions).
In my personal life, I don’t have any exes that I’m angry with (and I have some awful exes), it’s either confused, afraid of, pitying, neutral or positive.
Though tbh, I’m not sure if I just don’t recognize anger but do feel it. A coworker was sketchy about a tip we should have shared the other day, and I felt that it was wrong she pretended she hadn’t gotten a tip, and sad for her that she’d be deceptive about €0,65, but I wasn’t angry.
I do feel spiteful sometimes, which has got to be similar, but the only way I really express that is being extra polite to someone who’s being a dick so they feel guilty. It feels to me like I do that because I want them to be less rude in the future and I want to help induce the natural consequence of guilt that comes along with rudeness, but that could also just be my rationalizing it.