First the good news: The one part of our lives that is not affected by the heat is the anger trigger. We get as hot under the collar in winter as we do in summer.
Now the bad news: This means we cannot in good conscience blame our anger, our tantrums, and our general distaste for the world on the weather. We are angry like never before and global warming is not responsible for us heating up at the slightest provocation.
What then are the provocations for our eruptions, what are the triggers that get us from zero to hundred at lightning speed? The reasons are several and most people would agree that age perhaps has the greatest role to play in this. It’s not just the weather that gets intolerable as it hits the mid-forties, it is our mood as well. Middle-age anger is red hot and somehow quicker than the anger of old age and more frequent than the tantrums of youth. We feel like the young, ache and tire like those who are older, and rage at the triggers of both age groups. And then we have triggers of our own. Sometimes being called bad-tempered is in itself a trigger!
To misquote Tolstoy’s famed opening lines of Anna Karenina: ‘Happy people are all alike, every angry person is angry in his or her own way.’ However, there are some triggers that the 45-50 age group would agree on across gender and geography.
There is the frustration of city living. The interminable traffic, the crowds, the lack of space, the pace of life or the lack of it, and the fact that the city and the country have fallen short of our 1990s dreams. In Kolkata, we have no pavements left to walk on, in Bengaluru we spend more time in traffic than in homes, in Delhi-NCR we can’t breathe most of the year and Mumbai is a blur because of the searing pace. Across India, none of our politicians can be called leaders and all of them seem to annoyingly lurch from one election to the other. The list of triggers is interminable and as a result, tempers are frayed and the anger button gets pressed at the smallest provocation.
What then are the provocations for our eruptions, what are the triggers that get us from zero to hundred at lightning speed? The reasons are several and most people would agree that age perhaps has the greatest role to play in this. It’s not just the weather that gets intolerable as it hits the mid-forties, it is our mood as well.
The ones born between 1965-1975 had another impossible bouncer bowled at them in the form of social media. Recently, Nandan Nilekani in his book The Art of Bitfulness pointed out that social media happened to him in his fifties and his relationship with it hinged on the fact that it came to him in the second half of his life. If we use 2007 as a date from which we started to Orkut/Facebook and then Tweet and finally Insta, this generation was swept by the new tools of communication. With time those tools consumed us, making us its tool to clickbait us and to get trigger responses.
The annoyance of seeing friends from decades ago – they were sweet simple creatures back then — suddenly showcasing exotic holidays, pretty selfies, slim bodies (when one is eternally oscillating between biryani and hot yoga), right-wing views, anti-Kohli sentiments, excessive opinion on Scandinavian politics, a very showy knowledge of Ethiopian cuisine and even a worrying obsession with the neighbour’s Husky (why inflict Gurgaon weather on a cold weather breed?) is an annoyance that immediately heats the head.
One hears of men and women going on a digital detox, but honestly, is that what they do? Most abstain from posting but do not stop lurking around social media platforms and continue to get annoyed by all the triggers that made them want to detox in the first place.
Then there is the muddle of middle age. As our children are going from rebellious teenagers to independent working people, we feel deserted. At the other end, we have parents – fathers who used to swing us into their arms effortlessly and mothers who had all the time for us, are now limping, forgetting, ailing and depending on us. It is hard to see one’s parents age and while we knew this would happen we never knew how it would make us feel. I have friends in their mid-fifties who are torn between babysitting grandchildren and keeping bedside vigil for an ailing father. This was not the plan, and they feels betrayed at not being able to travel and do their own thing even at this age – everything therefore angers them, from Putin’s machinations to the brouhaha over celebrity weddings.
As an incredibly hot-tempered person myself I can understand rage well. After all, I have been angry at all ages. Sexism and gender-stereotyping annoyed me in my youth, the challenges of working in Kolkata and city-stereotyping annoy me now. The entitlement of those who know they are in positions of power and milk it remorselessly annoyed me always. Mortality, the grey hair, the laugh lines all poke me in the eye. All of this congeals and constricts into a rage in my head. As I grow older, I grow angrier more often.
Where is the solution? I try to leaven my anger with good humour, have decided to share my workload with others like an even-tempered zen husband and my young capable colleagues. I am more forgiving to myself, when the anger subsides I try to learn to avoid the triggers. Love, laughter and meeting friends who do not mind the odd eruption are the solutions. And yes, I have learnt to keep away from my phone as much as possible. As I grow older, I have also learnt that whatever the trigger, it is insignificant, it will pass, and if it comes back, it will pass again. I do rage but I know I will calm down.
Illustration by Suvamoy Mitra
