The Age of Rage
There’s so much to enrage a sane person — not just in the headlines, but in the everyday fabric of our lives
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The last couple of days I’ve been filled with rage. Nothing pathological or out of the ordinary — just some minor spikes in the normal baseline of everyday male rage. The triggering incidents were relatively trivial: a couple of man-boys wouldn’t shut up on Amtrak’s Quiet Car (these days an arena of bloody hand-to-hand fighting over etiquette), and a day later a scammer ripped me off for a pair of fake opera tickets. I was ultimately the victor in both situations: the guys on the train, after sassing me a little to show off for each other, did in fact quiet down, and my girlfriend and I ended up having a fun night anyway, because we always do. Both very annoying episodes, but neither one will matter six months from now.
But rage is seldom proportionate to its ostensible object. (I never think about the guy who stabbed me in the neck 25 years ago, but would coldly execute the kid who pulled my hair and called me “Mister Temper” when I was six). So over the next few days I found myself helplessly replaying the train argument, except coming up with better lines for myself, and envisioning elaborate revenge scenarios against the scammer. Even as I felt this feedback loop starting up in my head, I dreaded it; it’s like a ride you get strapped into, a drug that lasts a certain number of hours, or a disease that just has to run its course. And it’s ultimately pointless; I will never see any of these people again, and, more to the point, I will have forgotten all about this a year from now. An unhelpful friend of mine asked me years ago, when I was in the middle of an episode of rage: “You know you’re gonna get over it eventually, so why can’t you just skip to the part where you’re over it?”
I’m a little better at short-circuiting this cycle now than I used to be, so that I waste only a couple of days of my life — instead of weeks or months — having imaginary fights or orchestrating grand architectural Count-of-Monte-Cristo-like campaigns of revenge. Over a decade ago, I spent almost a year of my life out of my mind with jealous rage: I spent months composing emails I would never send, rehearsing speeches I would never give, entertaining violent plans I would certainly never…
