lashing out

This note last modified May 22, 2021

I think a large part of the reason people lash out is because of an understanding that they are angry, but a failure to understand why.

Your job was taken away and the infrastructure around you is falling apart? Just blame immigrants.

Angry at your partner and don’t know why? Maybe they’ve been leaving the toilet seat up, and you know it bothers you, but you just don't understand just how much it bothers you and it builds until you yell at them about something unrelated.

shittiness is the easy way out
- Introspection and growth is hard. It’s so much easier to lash out than it is to think through your issues. It’s so much easier to hang out with shitty people than build meaningful relationships with people who care.
communication requires knowing yourself
- A slightly more subtle idea is that, in order to communicate, you need to know yourself. If you don’t know why you feel angry, you will fail to communicate reasonably, and might lash out instead. Communication is thought of as an external thing between people, but funnily enough I think that one of the best ways to improve your communication is reflecting on yourself.
Cyberpunk 2077
- One thing that I’ve been thinking about lately is the inherent friction between people’s ease at seeing that something is wrong but our difficulty at figuring out what is wrong. It’s easy to say “my life is shit, I’m depressed all the time, and cruel people keep getting away with things”, but it’s really tough to have the critical thinking skills to think that it might be the cause of a system you’ve grown up with your whole life, something that has been propagandized into you as good (or at the least, normal). At the worst cases, this leads to people lashing out at immigrants, or commies, or whatever buzzword they’ve been talking about recently (and let’s be real, people on the left do this too, but I digress). At it’s best (but still just as insidious), it leads to the neonliberalism that the video talked about, a frustration with the world that doesn’t present any alternatives.