Comment on Help me understand littering
Azzu@lemm.ee 4 months agoI’m pretty much the same way. You gotta remember though that anger is not a negative emotion. An irrational amount of an emotion is a negative emotion.
An emotion is just a driving force of your behavior. “Angry” is mostly there for us to take action about unacceptable situations. Thus getting angry at the weather doesn’t make sense, since you can’t change it.
However, someone littering is in a limited way under your control. Like you said in another comment, you can confront them and use your power for them to pick up after themselves. Saying you’re not getting angry/irritated at all is the equivalent of not doing anything about it to most people. And I do think you’re at least getting irritated (which is a low form of anger) at people littering, which is why you do something about it or post this topic.
It seems to me a bit that you see any kind of anger, including being irritated, as bad, and thus show no sign of it/deny it even though you have it.
Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee 4 months ago
It’s obviously a negative feeling in my view. It can be used as motivation for changing things to the better but I can’t see it as anything else as negative. It’s not a pleasant feeling.
Ofcourse I’m not immune to it myself either but being such a strong emotion it’s nearly impossible to not notice and thus it acts as a kind of mindfulness alarm. When I catch myself getting angry at something I immediately realize how that is in conflict with how I see the world and then the anger basically dissapears. It’s kind of like waking up at the morning and being irritated that it’s raining outside but then at the same moment realizing that I can’t change the weather and I’ll rather just be wet than wet and angry. It’s the so called second arrow.
Unlike weather I can affect other people however, and I do. No disagreement there. I simply just don’t see the need to feel anger while doing so. It’s done and can’t be undone. They couldn’t have done otherwise so no need to get angry and pretend as if they could have. My intention is to encourage them to not act that way in the future.
Azzu@lemm.ee 4 months ago
I guess it depends on how much trouble you have with too much anger. Very often, anger is counterproductive, not only for yourself, but for actually effecting the change in others you desire.
In that case, it’s often good to “overcorrect” and rather try to feel less anger than appropriate, so that your troubles get reduced.
However, I still think it’s an overreaction and an appropriate amount of anger at the appropriate things is healthy, as in the end it’s actually a conflict within yourself to have less anger than appropriate - you’re forcing yourself to spend more energy suppressing/letting go of the anger, and then having less energy to effect the change you desire.