My New Year’s Resolution Is to Focus My Anger

For the last few years I’ve found myself getting angry at small things, which is so unlike me.

My resolution is to try harder to get angry only when it’s actually worth it. I can be angry at cruelty, angry at the forces destroying democracy for their own corrupt power, angry at the malevolences driving our climate crisis.

But I need to not get angry just because Instruments won’t profile my app, or I get a robocall, or someone on Twitter completely misses the point of something I wrote.

Anger — righteous, smashing anger — is completely called-for right now. But only at the right targets. This is the hard part, at least for me — it starts to spill out to where it doesn’t belong, and I can feel it corroding me.

I’m not by nature an angry person. Quite the opposite! But I do care deeply about some things.

My emotions somehow need to get smarter about what’s worth the anger and what things are not actually part of the current vast project of destruction.

I don’t know how to do that other than to constantly remind myself, when I feel it bubbling up over something small, that it’s not worth it.

But the problem with anger — even our current justifiable and necessary anger — is that it becomes a habit, and then it goes blind.