Is This Worth Your Peace of Mind? A Stoic Guide to Anger

From an evolutionary sense, we could say that, well, why do we have anger to begin with? It's obviously there for a reason.

Why would we have this button that could be pushed, that could turn us into crazy animals, where reason and logic gets turned off? And one theory is that anger is the appropriate response to when our boundaries get crossed.

So if we tell someone, no, thank you.

If we tell someone, no, thank you, no, thank you, don't do that.

And then they abuse us in some way or bully us.

mistreat us, then the reasonable part of ourselves clearly didn't work.

So you could say then anger is the backup plan.

You know, maybe there's a logic evolutionarily to being a bit irrational, to kind of lashing out, showing our teeth and our claws.

And essentially sending the signal that if you mess with me, I'm going to bring chaos into your life.

I'm going to fight you.

And that could make someone back off.

So there's definitely a reason for it to exist.

The question is...

Is it as useful now as it might have been in, you know, hunter gatherer days where we didn't have as much structure in society? We didn't have law and order.

Yeah, we didn't have societies that made great efforts to keep us safe.

You know, it was quite a challenge.

dog-eat-dog kind of world 100,000 years ago.

So anger might have been more useful then than it is now.

And then, you know, beyond that, we could say that we typically get angry when we have expectations about the world that then suddenly get broken.

So an example that I would give you here is if you're driving somewhere and I told you before you set off on your journey that in 10 minutes you're going to encounter a bad driver, they're going to be in a red car, and they're going to cut you off in this location, and you knew it was going to happen and then it happened, would you be very angry about it? Would you go crazy over that? You've already known that it's part of the plan, right? This can be contrasted with this idea that you go out, you take a journey, and what happens? You don't expect anyone to be a bad driver, and then suddenly you get cut off.

You have expectations about the world that are cut.

And it's those expectations versus reality that cause the frustration.

Having a toddler and seeing the anger that comes out, it's very often a kind of frustrated anger.

I wanted this thing to go this way and it didn't go that way.

I wanted a drink out of the blue cup and I got the red cup.