What Anger Does When You Let It Live Too Long

I didn’t wake up one day angry at the world.

I just started paying attention.

At first, that felt like growth. Like I was finally doing what adults are supposed to do—stop swallowing the easy stories, stop taking things at face value, start noticing patterns. You read enough history, you listen to enough people talk about their lives, you watch the same arguments cycle back around with new language and slightly different villains, and eventually you stop believing it’s all random.

You start noticing how often cruelty gets excused, normalized, or even celebrated, as long as it’s pointed in the “right” direction. How fear keeps showing up wearing different costumes. How certainty is usually louder than understanding. None of that made me angry right away. Mostly it made me uncomfortable. Like realizing a room you’ve been in for years has a low, constant hum you’d tuned out.

The anger came later.

At first, it felt like it made sense. You see harm more clearly, you react more strongly. That seemed reasonable to me. Necessary, even. Anger felt like proof that I hadn’t gone numb. Like a refusal to shrug and move on while other people were getting ground up by systems that didn’t care whether they lived or died, as long as things kept running on schedule.

For a while, that anger felt clean. Focused. Almost disciplined. It felt like clarity.

But anger doesn’t stay where you put it.

If you live inside it long enough—especially if you’re in spaces that reward it—it stops being a reaction and starts becoming a posture. A default stance. A way of moving through the world. You don’t even notice it happening at first. I didn’t. I just knew I was tired all the time, keyed up, waiting for the next thing to be pissed about like it was my turn to speak.

What I did notice, eventually, was that I wasn’t just angry anymore. I was sharp. What’s worse, I was enjoying it.

I liked having words ready. I liked reading a post and already knowing how I was going to dismantle it halfway through the first paragraph. I liked crafting replies that landed hard, knowing exactly where to press to make them sting. I liked that small, ugly jolt of satisfaction when they did.

In hindsight, it should have bothered me sooner. Because somewhere along the line, I stopped just being angry at systems or outcomes or patterns, and started enjoying it when harm landed on people I’d already decided didn’t deserve my empathy. If someone had spent years dismissing other people’s pain, I felt a grim sort of balance watching them experience some of their own. If someone trafficked in cruelty, I felt justified being cruel back.

And I told myself, in all sincerity, that this didn’t make me like them. That it made me better. Smarter. More honest. That my anger was righteous and corrective and earned. It was ok for me to be mean and cruel and angry, because I was doing it for the right reasons.

In hindsight, as always, this reasoning was dangerous. But emotionally, it felt like equilibrium.

That’s the thing about anger. It’s incredibly good at convincing you that it’s the most honest version of yourself. It feels direct, unfiltered. Real. And once you start believing that, it becomes very easy to excuse a lot of behavior you would have condemned in yourself under different circumstances.

What finally made me stop and really look at myself wasn’t another argument or another headline.

It was the slow realization that the person I was becoming didn’t actually line up with the beliefs I’ve carried for most of my adult life. There came a moment where I had to stop and consciously ask myself, am I a bad person because I so often give in to the worse side of me? The side that is mean and vindictive and angry and deliberately hurtful to people who either accept or encourage the suffering of others because of these differences that shouldn’t matter? Am I the worse person for thinking that these are just bad people and the world would be better off if they died out? That I would love nothing more than to inflict on them the suffering they allow or enjoy for others?

I decided, maybe somewhat selfishly, that I’m not a bad person. Just that, perhaps, I was not as good a person as I wanted to believe.

I’ve always believed—deeply, not as a slogan—that people are people first. That whenever you strip away race, identity, politics, whatever label we’re fighting over this week, you still end up face-to-face with another human being. And that systems built on dehumanization rot everyone they touch, including the people who think they’re on the winning side of them.

Those beliefs aren’t new. They’re foundational. They’re the yardstick I’ve used to measure a lot of my decisions.

And yet I had to admit that I was getting more and more comfortable acting in ways that didn’t match them, as long as I could explain myself afterward. I was still informed. Still convinced I was right. Still able to justify every sharp edge if I needed to. But I wasn’t becoming more humane in the process. I was becoming quicker to dismiss, quicker to write people off, quicker to decide that someone’s entire humanity could be summarized by the worst thing I associated them with.

That disconnect bothered me more than I wanted it to.

Social media didn’t create that shift, but it poured gasoline on it.

Spending years in a space that thrives on outrage and bad-faith engagement changes how you think. I noticed myself reading everything through the least charitable lens available. I noticed how rarely I paused before responding. How often I felt almost disappointed when something didn’t give me a reason to be angry.

What I told myself was that I was staying informed. What it actually was, more often than not, was a steady diet of emotional overstimulation and moral one-upmanship. I wasn’t just observing the world anymore. I was letting the environment shape how I reacted to it, how quickly I judged it, and how little patience I had for anything that didn’t immediately confirm what I already believed.

I got rid of Facebook. It wasn’t a dramatic gesture or a moral stand. It wasn’t a flounce. It was the obvious answer to a very real problem.

I could feel what that environment was doing to me, and I didn’t like the direction it was pulling me. Staying felt like feeding a version of myself that was increasingly incompatible with the person I want to be. So I stepped away—not to disengage from reality, not to go neutral, but to stop actively reinforcing parts of myself that were starting to feel corrosive.

Mind you, that doesn’t actually make the anger disappear.

I’m still angry. I still pay attention. I still read the news and feel that familiar knot of rage form in my gut when I see stories about people being brutalized or killed for simply existing—people like Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both shot and killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis in recent weeks. Sometimes the anger is so sharp I have to stop what I’m doing, breathe, and consciously keep it from spilling outward in ways I know won’t actually help anyone, least of all me.

That reaction hasn’t gone away. I don’t think it should; but I do have to admit it’s not exactly healthy.

What has changed is my willingness to pretend that anger itself is evidence of virtue, or that having the “right” reasons grants me moral immunity. I don’t want to be someone who needs other people to be worse in order to feel righteous. I don’t want to confuse being correct with being kind, or being justified with being humane. And I don’t want to wake up one day and realize that in fighting dehumanization, I quietly adopted some of its habits because they felt good in the moment.

This isn’t about disengaging or numbing myself to what’s happening. It’s about learning how to stay angry without becoming cruel. How to stay aware without letting awareness harden into contempt. How to refuse indifference without letting rage become my identity.

That balance isn’t easy. I don’t pretend I’ve solved it. Some days I get it wrong. Probably more than I’d like to admit.

But I know that pretending this tension didn’t exist was costing me more than I was willing to keep paying.

I’m still in the world. I’m still paying attention. I’m still angry about the things worth being angry about.

I’m just trying, deliberately and imperfectly, not to let that anger turn me into the kind of person I was angry at to begin with.