One of my “impossible goals” is to rid myself from internal and external anger. The external anger is easier to address, through discipline and special techniques I suppose. And I have seen some self-improvement over the past years. But the internal anger is at least as disruptive and stifling productivity, because it makes me irritated and unable to concentrate, basically unproductive. But how do you stop it? One thing that might help is trying to understand why I get angry about things. This is what I am trying to do in this post.

 

So one major thing that causes me to get angry is if other people are being inconsiderate. It shouldn’t bother me what other people do, right? Ok, there are those that really bother others by screaming instead of talking, sitting down next to me and start watching some video with their phone in speaker-mode, or people who openly jump the queue by pretending they can’t see you. But the thing is, I even get upset with people who don’t really bother me. For instance, I scorn people who at any given time during the day just sit in coffee shops, enjoying the free wifi and aircon without drinking or eating anything. Or while I usually don’t mind if there is music in a coffeeshop coming from the speakers, I get very irritated about people listening to their phone in speaker mode, even if the volume is much lower. This doesn’t make any sense.

 

A similar situation arises when you see someone cheating in an exam. You probably feel upset, even though it doesn’t affect your marks. Ok, there might be bell curve moderation, but even without it you probably still feel it is unfair that you studied a lot and someone else gets the same or a better grade by cheating.

 

So seeing other people acting inconsiderately and unfairly is bothering me a lot. And I really wanted to find out where my anger is coming from. So I started searching and reading. I read that anger in these situtions is often due to feeling disrespected, even though the other person doesn’t actually mean to disrespect you. But actually, I don’t feel disrespected, but I just feel upset because to me the other person seems inconsiderate and selfish. But why should this bother me?

 

And then I discovered an amazing posts that was really revelatory. It described a situation that was just like mine. Imagine you are at a football game, have payed decent money for your ticket, and then you see someone climbing over the fence to get in. If you are me, you probably would get really upset with that person (although nowadays I don’t think I would get upset about things related to money). Anyway, let’s say you or me are upset and we go and tell the security and the person gets thrown out. What did we win? Nothing, in fact the author argues that we lose and hurt ourselves because we miss part of the game, and we also look quite stupid to our friends. This type of behavior is actually called altruistic punishment. You pay a price to hurt others because they are doing something that is morally wrong. And it turns out that this has to do with the free rider problem.

 

When you are on the train and want to watch a youtube video, of course it is much easier to not dig out your earphones and not care about others. Just use your phone speakers. And when you just want to enjoy the free wifi and aircon in a coffee shop, why buy a drink. Being a free rider is so much easier. But the problem comes if everyone does it. If everyone were to listen to their movies or music in the train with speakers on, nobody would be able to understand anything. If everyone just sits in the coffee shop without buying a drink, there would be no coffee shops. So why isn’t everyone just free riding all the time. Or in other words, how is it possible for our society to actually function, when free riding is always an option.

 

And it seems to be due to the phenomenon of “altruistic punishment”, where people like me take it on ourselves to tell people off who don’t play by the rules. Without it, society wouldn’t function. Hence our natural response to the free rider problem, where some people follow the rules and others don’t, is to get angry.

 

The question is of course, does knowing about the free rider problem and altruistic punishment help to get less angry. Well, first of all it feels good to know the reasons behind it. And knowing where the feeling is coming from may make it easier to ignore it. I hope so at least. But this probably requires constant reminders.

 

What this post also shows is that reading and writing about something is really helpful to learn more about ourselves.

 

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