When Sadness Turns to Rage: Managing Yourself

Two weeks into the abominable Russian invasion of Ukraine, I’d spent a lot of the time glued to twitter and the news. Besides trying to keep in contact with friends and colleagues there, and trying to help where I could. It was and still is a rough time. Obviously, not as rough as the poor refugees fleeing in the midst of winter. Or as rough a time for the brave Ukrainian civilians and military defending their homes and family against a much larger aggressor in Putin’s Russia. 

Racked with a feeling of helplessness & guilt for not being able to do more, you find yourself stuck into the vortex of consuming even more news and tweets. Yes, donating money and spreading the news of the good cause is something but it’s just not enough. You stew in your emotions. Add to this, the worry for your friends, the sadness you feel for the injustice & the loss of the potential and promise of this young emerging Ukrainian democracy and the rich culture life there, it quickly turned into anger and rage. Which is probably what triggered an uncharacteristic twitter attack on that Right wing A–hole criticizing Ukraine & western support for them. A need to take any remote action as trite or silly as it is. 

Looking back on this, its incredibly stupid. And that stupid event only led me to more rage. To the point that I almost got into some stupid live fist fights against random dudes who bumped into me, in super chill and relaxing Hawaii of all the most places! I literally saw red. If I knew or ran into any of the incel trolls, I probably would have physically attacked and hurt them. And then who would have lost? Me. I would have disappointed my parents who raised me to be better, been a bad example for my kid and frankly just hurt myself by wrecking what is an incredibly charmed and wonderful life that I worked decades to build.

I’m really quite embarrassed by this, as I like to think that I am a rational, civilized and well educated person. But that episode showed me we are not that far off from the gorillas or neanderthals we descended from. Especially ones put into constant “Flight or Fight” mode now for close to 2 years as I wrote about here: https://hardfork.substack.com/p/why-is-everyone-so-angry-behavioral. 

Not excusing my behavior at all. Yet we dealt with 2 years of a pandemic, social isolation and media inflammation. Now we are dealing with a very big land war in Europe started by a dictator against a smaller country, with even more media inflammation on both sides. No wonder everyone is so triggered. 

This is why Justin Jackson’s article on calming down came at such a good time. He gives a lot of good tips on how to manage your feelings of anxiety. Works for anger too. I recommend reading it here: https://justinjackson.ca/calm-down

I spent a lot of time those few days just meditating and breathing. And the real life actions I took were sending donations to various charities (www.rescue.org or https://wck.org) supporting Ukrainian refugees. You have to wallow in sadness, helplessness and even anger but you have to let it go. Or it will eventually destroy you. 

As the Buddha (and Naval Ravikant) remarked: “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”