Belly Button Lint

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Tag: anger

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    Alarm overload: the hospital

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    1–2 minutes

    Hospitals, designed to heal, paradoxically create an environment that intensifies anxiety and sensory overload. The constant beeps and chirps, each signaling a need, blend into a cacophony of emergencies ignored by habituated staff.

    Patients and families are caught in a disorienting field of incredulity: an alarm should be alarming, so why does no one react?

    This annoying soundscape fosters clinical insanity. Jargon-laden exchanges over walkie-talkies interrupt a family’s soothing attempts at comfort, and brusque nurses ignore requests. The unrelenting stimuli are mirrored by the disregard for concern.

    Peace is stripped, amplifying vulnerability and maddening rage. Here, managerial/institutional desensitization obscures the very purpose of care: to soothe, settle, not stimulate.

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    From Prophets to Projecting Subjective Discontent

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    1–2 minutes

    A century ago, street preachers screamed judgment and redemption, channeling their fervor and insanity through faith, framing their cries within an accepted grand narrative.

    Today, in a secular age, that passion is turned inward before being expelled: the individual subject is the grand narrative, the personal grievance replaces the religious outrage.

    We now assert personal grievances without the constraint—or comfort—of a larger belief system, without a community to merge and shape our discontent, both reducing the impact of our fevered exhortation and making our outcry so unique it becomes fragmented, self-serving, and appears crazy.

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    Rage is articulate

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    1–2 minutes

    Happiness is an emotive well-being, perhaps chatty but primarily a glowing emanation content in quietude. Depression stifles language, muting the desire to express.
    Rage, on the other hand, manifests as an expulsion of incisive expletives targeting idiocy and injustice. Extreme anger becomes intellectual and cerebral, arming itself with honed arguments and tactical acumen as unknown linguistic prowess shapes words into weapons.

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    proximity to passion thwarts compassion

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    1–2 minutes

    There is an “uncanny valley” of caring: something close enough to your passion but distant enough to be at odds with your taste. You can’t pretend to care what you carefully despise.

    Something completely “other” is a field/subject/person you can not have a desire for, so the introduction is fascinating: the distance makes it easier to care, and yet you do not have enough care to hate.

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    The pain hook

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    1–2 minutes

    When we feel hurt by someone, we take it out on them: we keep them on the hook.

    Rather than attending to our own hurt (like physical injury), we blame and rage at them. Thrashing about we further hurt ourselves: the barbed hook is actually in us.

    Until we can approach the pain, and feel it for what it is (ourselves being hurt) we cannot remove the barb, feel forgiveness, and heal.

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    reacting to unfairness

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    1–2 minutes

    Unfairness causes backlash in proportion: resentment at imbalance causes a reactive lockdown or retaliation to rebalance the dynamic.

    Our reaction is to change who we are: to protect ourselves, we become someone else.

    However, the rage you feel towards others is your own. (You produce and maintain it; you can also drop it.)

    A genuine achievement is not getting even, but despite being wounded, remaining kind: remaining you.

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    Going to Walmart

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    1–2 minutes

    To treat someone a certain way for profit (i.e., “I will give you the cheaper goods and run my business cheaper, and along the way, you suffer indignity”) is a bargain that we make.

    To suffer unfair accusations repeatedly is crazy-making.

    It turns people into that kind of animal who finds cause in rebelling against the indignity.

    Yet, we must overcome this animalistic response in a reversal: offer back an abundance of charity to make up for the lack of trust in humanity. Convert your resentment at pre-accusation not into cynicism, but into easy acts of kindness where even the smallest gesture stands out.

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    The new must come slowly

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    1–2 minutes

    We constantly seek novelty, but we hate the new.

    We will claim to want new things, but only if they are slightly new, marginally better, and often with little impact on our lives.

    Anything genuinely new is disruptive. We must rethink our lives and how we deal with the world.

    Thus, even if it is an excellent change, such as Jesus coming to earth or marvelous life-and-labor-saving machines freeing us from work, we will hate those changes because they are too new, require too much identity, and relinquish too much agency.

    Newness must come about slowly.

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    Atrocity: Love/hate or delusion

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    1–2 minutes

    Jordan Peterson decries Marxism by considering “the great leap Forward” in China, which cost 40 million lives. Peterson asked whether or not that change was due to “love or hate” and claimed it was instead due to delusional ignorance.

    I agree, and he is right to escape the moral value binary.

    Applied to Western societies, nationalism, capitalism, and Christianity also manifest deadly delusional ignorance.

    However, from a stance of Buddhist detachment, everything can be declared “delusional ignorance,” which may simply be the state of man no matter how far we assume we have progressed.

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    Nietzsche on the folly of revenge

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    1–2 minutes

    Nietzsche says revenge is an attempt to “will away” what happened in the past.

    As Nietzsche says, trying to erase the past to reset boundaries is an extraordinary folly.

    It is impossible, which means your willful logic enacted is self-deception, which creates a version of you that can never return to reality or forgiveness.