What to do with all this anger?

Joy and freedom amidst the conflict entrepreneurs

Dear Friends,

Anger can be a powerful source of motivation. My entire career was motivated by anger. I was angry that rich people had more freedom than poor people. I was angered by Americans’ ignorance about how our policies affect the rest of the world. I was angered by poverty and preventable disease wherever I saw it. Narcissists, hypocrites, and anything that struck me as an injustice — it all made me angry.

Mostly though, I was angry about my childhood — and my career became an outlet to channel it productively.¹

It was my anger, deeply suppressed and rarely rising to the surface, that motivated me to work harder and longer.

And then, therapy. What if I was able to let go of the anger about how I was raised? What if my career was motivated by love and pleasure instead of anger and ambition? What if I focused more on supporting the individuals in my life (and community) and less on sweeping, global concepts of poverty, violence, and discrimination?

That is the question I now face over the next 14 months of sabbatical. What is a job where I am motivated by love and fun? How can I play a useful, authentic role in my community? Can I let go of proving myself, seeking prestige, and feeding off anger that no longer exists?

Could I get that from teaching students? What if I work in a coffee shop again? Or an orphanage? Or guiding rich cyclists? Or some combination? I’ll surely be piloting many of these experiences over the next year to see what I learn.

Angry News

I still get upset when I make a mistake.

But what about when something bad happens in the world that is out of my control? What happens to my emotions when 500,000 people are killed in Ethiopia during a two-year conflict? Or in Yemen, where more than 100,000 have been killed in the civil conflict? Or when 12,000 people were killed in this year alone in West Darfur? Or, closer to home, when 70,000 Mexicans have been killed or disappeared by drug cartels?²

The news does not fill me with frustration or sadness in the same way because there is little I can do, nor am I the right person to try to. I know a few Yemeni immigrants in the Bay Area who told me that Houthis are a bunch of Taliban-like, gun-toting, rural, rednecks who should be imprisoned.³ I’ve heard similar things about Tigrayans in Ethiopia; that there is something fundamentally wrong with their culture. I’m skeptical of any claim that a whole group of people is flawed. But then again, I’ve never been to Yemen, and I’ve never met a Houthi rebel; all I can do is try to better understand the situation and hope that the same forces that reduced violence in most of the world will take hold.

Death Cab for Happy

I had drafted another section about why people are so angry at Sam Bankman-Fried⁴, but I’m kind of beating a dead horse, aren’t I?⁵

So I’ll close by sharing that I had soooo much fun at the Death Cab and Postal Service show last week. Back in my 20s, Death Cab for Cutie was the best soundtrack to sadness. As one blogger wrote for Refinery, “His diaristic lyrics about depression, lost love, and displacement were like musical antidepressants to me.” And back in 2012, Stereogum asked, “What is it about Ben Gibbard that inspires a celebration of depression?”

Sometimes, when you’re young and sad, you just want to hear some lyrics and minor chords that echo your melancholy.

Ben Gibbard was the emo icon in the early 2000s: sadly strumming his guitar while staring through his overgrown bangs down at his shoes.

20 years later, Ben Gibbard in his 40s is all laughter and dancing and living his best life. Giving up alcohol and taking up ultra-endurance trail running seemed to help. As he described in a KEXP interview back in 2019:

There is inevitably a moment where everything falls away and I'm just a being in space. Just moving through the world. Moving through this beautiful environment on a trail on a mountain somewhere and all the concerns that you might have about anything in your life just disappear and you have these moments of flow and Zen.

It had been a long time since I had been to a concert where I knew practically every lyric of every song. Everyone in the audience seemed to know every lyric of every song. And so we all sang along with happy faces to sad songs with an occasional glimmer of hope:

Again last night I had that strange dream
where everything was exactly how it seemed
concerns about the world getting warmer
people thought that they were just being rewarded
for treating others as they'd like to be treated
for obeying stop signs and curing diseases
for mailing letters with the address of the sender
Now we can swim any day in November

10 more days until November!!! 😬

If you’ve had an angry week, I hope that I haven’t added to it. And I hope you have a fun weekend,

David

1. Sports was another channel. I would wear my anger down through a level of training that most people couldn’t relate to.

2. In 2011, Iris and I were close to joining the statistics … a story for another time.

3. The Houthi slogan is “God is great, death to the US, death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory for Islam"

4. I do have my theories

5. Sorry, terrible idiom. You’d have to indeed be a very angry person to beat a dead horse.