Analyzing Relationship Drama Reddit Story

Unbounded
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I would say it has been a big problem and will be (and I guess could be right now). I could go into some stuff about how I’ve worked on anger (which hasn’t really been much truth be told), but it wouldn’t answer your question (feel free to ask if you want).

I would say the reason its not a priority is because I have this vision of getting better at doing things and then I will fix my anger. I’m pretty open on admitting that I’m kind of a mess when it comes to how my life is managed. I envision getting my life in a semblance of order and then working on something like anger. Part of the reason is because while I have had anger affect my life in major ways I forget after a while.

During those times anger does affect me poorly. I do take it seriously (though I may not deal with it correctly), but then I’ll have a time period of peace. I equate this time period of non-anger with dealing with it. However, I’ll get angry again at some point.

Hmm. I guess putting it another way: maybe you’d think with this important I would realize that these times of non-anger haven’t really dealt with my anger and so I would deal with it. However, since I don’t keep dealing with it I have this vision of a me who is more put together who realizes how mistaken he keeps being and thats when I’ll deal with it.

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Are you getting angry while working on that other improvement? In other words, is the anger directly interfering with the progress you’re trying to make, or only interfering with other parts of your life?

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Hmm. Initially I would’ve said no, but then I realized I think I’m confusing times when I get angry and “crash-out” versus just getting really angry and not doing anything. So now I’d say yes. Like today some stuff happened with my manager and how it got resolved by my DM kinda annoyed me. This thing that annoyed me and got me angry is something that I keep thinking of that takes time and energy. I guess I only focused on anger when it comes to angry outburts, but I would say generally anger also affects my day to day. There are times when I’m so caught up in something thats making me angry that I need to tell myself that its consuming all my mental energy, but I don’t see that anger as bad because it hasn’t lead to any crazy outburst or whatever.

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Do you get angry while doing philosophy stuff? About the philosophy stuff?

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Hmm. Kinda? Never really on straight up philosophy stuff like your articles but I have gotten tilted in the past over some math problems. Nothing coding wise has tilted me so far.

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One the main considerations for what to work on is what plan you have for each candidate topic. If you had a really great plan for working on anger, that you thought would be fun and bring big results fast, then I would say definitely do that. If you don’t have a good plan for working on anger (even after spending some time on planning), but you do have a good plan for working on something else, then that’d be a reason to go with something else.

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First of all: if that’s working for you, cool, keep it up. I am not trying to discourage you.

But if it maybe isn’t working super well, I would consider rethinking this a bit. There are some common psychological pitfalls people can fall into where they imagine that they will make some important life change at an unspecified time in the future when things are better.

When I’m an adult…
When I have more free time…
When it’s the new year and I have a gym membership…
When I’m more financially stable…
When I’m not so depressed…
When I’ve learned how to think better…

Sometimes these ideas are references to real, active problems that should take priority. But sometimes, they are something more akin to excuses. It’s easy to think this stuff and then keep putting off the change that you know you ought to make. You will never be perfect. So don’t wait until you have achieved perfection in one area before trying to improve in other areas.

Getting super angry the way you described seems pretty likely to cause secondary problems in your life. And like I said last time, there are tons of “how to deal with anger” resources available.

Lots of those resources won’t be very good at helping you manage anger in whatever you might imagine to be a super effective Critical Fallibilism Approved ultra-rational way. But that’s the wrong goal. You don’t need help managing anger super effectively. If you get angry enough to destroy things you value, and almost hurt people, then your level of anger is very much in the “mainstream bad anger problem” level. And imperfect, inefficient anger management techniques can help you improve.

Assigning some arbitrary numbers for the purposes of illustrating my point…

Right now you get angry at like a level 75/100. It’s pretty bad. You haven’t killed anyone or anything, it could be worse, but it’s not great. And maybe if you learned a ton of philosophy and became super smart and rational and fixed everything in your life you could easily get your anger level down to a 15/100, or even lower.

But with mainstream, imperfect tools you could probably get your anger down to a 50/100, or even a 40/100. Lots of regular non-genius non-philosophers can manage that. And that could pay dividends on your quality of life. And maybe even make it easier for you to continue improving in other ways.

Once again, this is just for consideration. I do also agree with Elliot about this:

If you don’t have a good plan for working on anger (even after spending some time on planning), but you do have a good plan for working on something else, then that’d be a reason to go with something else.

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Do you know any resources that are particularly good? My understanding is lots of people find lots of resources ineffective, and some people get pretty stuck for years despite trying.

One option is just to quickly try several normal resources (if you haven’t already) and see if they work for you. See if you can get a quick win but don’t keep slogging forward with something if noticeable progress isn’t coming pretty early on. The resources to be tried should be chosen to be pretty different than each other so you get more variety.

I don’t know his history and whether he already tried some stuff.

I agree that most solutions would be beneficial as long as they actually work (meaning bring significant improvement, not work perfectly). It’s fine as long as a solution is within the mainstream range for rationality stuff or better (rather than being particularly bad by mainstream standards).

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I agree with your idea to try a variety of normal resources.

I don’t think I know of any mainstream anger management resources I would say are particularly good. I personally had issues with anger when I was quite a bit younger (approximately 25 years ago now)… and I am not sure that what helped me was mainstream anger management. But plenty of people do find limited success that way (and yeah, plenty of people also fail). And I think limited success here would be preferable to zero success.

I can list a few things that I think helped me, bearing in mind I may not remember everything perfectly and I do not necessarily think these will work for everyone…

I don’t actively practice meditation currently, but there is some overlap between meditation and certain practices that I think helped — being alone with my thoughts, focusing on breathing, clearing mind of distractions, stuff like that. Also, it helped to recognize that outward expressions of anger (like smashing stuff) don’t solve anything and just make me feel worse.

Generally, one thing that still works well now is to create distance between myself and the thing that I am angry about. I will take time alone to think about why I feel angry, and try to think about what things would actually help solve the problem I am angry about. Typically, none of those solutions involve “stay angry.”

I would not be surprised if none of those are particularly helpful, though. I might be unusual in various ways.

I don’t know his history and whether he already tried some stuff.

Yeah, me either. If he’s tried a lot of common suggestions and none of them helped much, then that’s fair. Maybe putting anger on the back burner makes sense in that case. I don’t know for sure that anger should be a primary problem for him to deal with right now. I just figured there was a chance it might be, because the way he talked about it reminded me of situations where people put off incremental improvements pending some hypothetical improved circumstance.

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Hmm. Tbh I think its more of an excuse thing. Though one confusion I think I’m personally having here is mixing up time management with my life being put together. I’ll think on this more later, but I realized many times when I refer to my life being a mess its more so referring to the time management side of things being a mess. Their are other parts that are a mess, yes, but thats not typically what I think of I feel.

I could definitely work on time management while doing other things instead of waiting for some magical time period where I’m better or whatever.

Nothing really. No actual research into anger management specifically. Closest I’ve done is doing meditation because I’ve heard in passing how it can help with emotional regulation, but that’s all I’ve done really and I don’t really do it for anger. I do it because I think it’ll help me focus when it comes to CF and other things I want to do.