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.

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    6 hours ago

    I was living pretty much entirely anger-free until 2 things happened:

    • I started working at my job, where I was hired for my expertise and yet I am frequently interrupted mid-sentence, disrespected, or told to do things in ways that defy the foundations of my entire discipline (before anyone tells me to quit, I can’t, because of immigration-related reasons)
    • One of my friends has fallen down the alt-right/X/Musk fanboyism pipeline and just about everything he rants is uninformed, reactionary, and rage-inducing. He spends too much of his time being angry about problems that don’t exist and spreads that anger everywhere

    Saying that, I am autistic and often struggle to distinguish between anger, frustration, feeling hurt, and even sadness. I can isolate depression as a feeling fairly reliably though, because that is more numb and less passionate.