Anger Is Not the Problem. What We Do With It Is.

Let’s be honest about the mood in the United States right now. A lot of people aren’t just anxious or unsettled. They are angry. Not performatively angry. Not shouting on social media. But carrying a deep, simmering rage that has nowhere sensible to go.

I know this, because I work with thoughtful people in the States, and this is what they tell me – constantly!

Anger at lies that no longer shock. Anger at systems that feel rigged. Anger at performative cruelty being rewarded and kindness and decency dismissed as weakness. Anger at the sense that something precious is being broken in plain sight, with no adult in the room.

If that anger is alive in you, it doesn’t mean you are unstable or radicalised. It means you are paying attention.

Why This Anger Runs So Deep

What we are witnessing is not just political conflict. It is a violation of expectation.

Many thoughtful adults grew up with an implicit social contract: that while power could be abused, there were limits; that while leaders could disappoint, there were norms; that truth, law, and basic decency still mattered.

That contract now feels shredded. Worse still, religious authorities, who were expected to uphold high moral principles, have been co-opted by power without a murmur.

And anger is the appropriate human response to betrayal.

The problem is not the anger itself. The problem is that our culture offers only two places for it to go:

• Outward, as outrage, contempt, and dehumanisation.

• Inward, as despair, numbness, or quiet self-loathing for “caring too much”.

Neither path leads anywhere good.

The Seduction of Righteous Anger

Anger feels clarifying. It sharpens perception. It restores a sense of moral gravity in a world that feels upside down.

That’s why it is so easily recruited.

Movements, commentators, and algorithms all know how to convert anger into identity: If you feel this way, you belong with us. Certainty is offered as relief. Enemies are named. Complexity is dismissed.

But righteous anger has a shelf life. Over time, it hardens. It narrows. It begins to resemble the very thing it claims to oppose, and many people in midlife can feel that happening inside themselves: a tightening, a loss of generosity, a creeping bitterness that doesn’t sit comfortably with who they know themselves to be.

Anger as the Voice of Our Worst Fears

Anger isn’t a ‘stand-alone’ emotion. It is most commonly the expression of what we fear. It is fear that excites the fight-flight mechanisms of our brain and fear that lashes out.

Fear is the most powerful way in which we are separated from love; love for self and love for neighbour.

Why This Hits Harder in Midlife

This is not happening in a vacuum. Midlife is already a season of reckoning: with parents, children, bodies, marriages, regrets, and beliefs that no longer quite work.

So when public life starts to mirror chaos, betrayal, and moral confusion, it lands on already tender ground. It frightens us.

The anger is about accumulated disappointments — personal and collective — converging at once. That is why telling people to “just switch off” is useless advice. The anger isn’t coming from information overload. It’s coming from a clash between values and reality.

Strength Without Hardness

There is a widespread confusion right now between strength and hardness.

Hardness looks like certainty, aggression, moral superiority, and the refusal to listen. It feels powerful in the short term. It gives anger somewhere to stand, but hardness exacts a cost. It corrodes relationships. It distorts judgment and eventually consumes the person carrying it.

Strength is something quieter and far more difficult.

Strength is the capacity to stay open without being naïve. To feel anger without becoming cruel. To refuse both collapse and domination as responses to fear.

This kind of strength doesn’t trend well. It doesn’t fit neatly into slogans. But it is the only kind that actually sustains a life.

A Spiritual Task, Whether You Like the Word or Not

You don’t need religious belief to recognise that this is a spiritual moment.

By that I mean: it forces a question that no institution can answer for you.

How will I live — inwardly and outwardly — when the world behaves badly?

Will you outsource your moral centre to a tribe? Will you let rage hollow you out? Or will you do the harder work of becoming someone whose anger sharpens conscience rather than destroying it?

That work is slow. It is private. It often feels lonely, but it is the work of adulthood.

A Different Use of Anger

Anger, at its best, is energy for protection.

It exists to say: this matters. This line should not be crossed. Something precious is at risk.

The task is not to extinguish it, but to discipline it — to let it inform your values without dictating your behaviour.

That means choosing where you give your attention. Choosing how much outrage you consume. Choosing relationships over performance. Choosing depth over noise.

None of this will fix the world.

But it may stop the world from breaking you.

A Closing Thought

If you are angry about what is unfolding in the US, you are not alone. You are responding to a real moral injury.

The question now is not whether your anger is justified, but whether it will make you smaller or wiser.

That is a choice you still have — even now.

source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/chaddavisphotography/55029410378/