It's easier than ever to get angry today. Open up social media and you are flooded with a deluge of anger-inducing comments,posts,videos and opinions. Someone else has a different opinion from you? Get angry
Someone cooked something wrong? Get angry
Someone played a game a certain way? Get angry
Social injustice? Get angry
The end result?
Hate.
people spend thousands of hours screaming at each other over the internet wasting millions of liters of water and accelerating the sixth mass extinction. All of this for what? Because someone said something mildly different.
People with this kind of reactionary behaviour are referred to as ‘snow-flakes’ and like their namesake, they crumble at the slightest incident into a screeching ball of fire.
Nowadays most of the internet behaves like snowflakes, a near continuous stream of offensive and deranged content attracts an endless stream of users who participate in the ritual of anger. Often discussion and criticism devolve into mud-slinging with vitriol flowing freely as the anonymity of the internet protects one from criticism. This ritual of anger is encouraged by social media companies who design algorithms to boost engagement and addiction, for them there’s no such thing as negativity, only engagement. So they feed the fire of anger. All of this leads to many bad outcomes.
Physically, excess anger damages the stomach and leads to hypertension. Mentally this anger addiction reduces empathy, tolerance and makes us mentally unstable. In short this age of anger is setting up an age of suffering.
Anger is neither good nor bad, it’s an emotion that pops up when required. Anger is important, it drives us to right the wrongs and stand up to authority. Anger is powerful, it has dethroned oppressive regimes like the Bangladesh government and more recently the Nepal government.
Anger is what drives change and this age of anger has great potential for change. However the revolutions anger bring cannot be sustained without kindness, calmness and compassion which create a new and better world.
Hence the current age is one of constant revolution, where everyone drowns in anger and screams at each other for the most trivial things. In such an environment we stand doomed to fade into the good night while rotating around the nucleus of manufactured outrage.
But this need not be the case, by following the principles of Gandhi. By being a little kinder, we can turn this age of anger into an age of enlightenment.
So the next time you get angry, just ask yourself if it’s really necessary. Save your anger for what matters and instead choose forgiveness.
