Posted on: Tuesday, March 6, 2001
Author says little things contribute to crankiness
By Valerie Finholm
Hartford Courant
“Said I, in scorn all burning hot,
In rage and anger high,
‘You ignominious idiot!
Those wings are made to fly!”’
— Author Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman (1860-1935)
Road rage, air rage, desk rage. Gym rage, grocery-cart rage, parking-lot rage.
Rain rage (watch it with that umbrella, jerk!), barking-dog rage, dance-floor rage.
The beat goes on … and on.
If you have noticed all of the stories about rage in the newspapers and on television lately, you might feel a little raged-out.
But if all of the coverage is really irritating you, making you uptight, perhaps even angry, then you might be part of the story.
“It isn’t the big things in life that make us cranky. It’s the buildup of little things, day after day, that get to us,” says C. Leslie Charles, author of the self-help book “Why is Everyone So Cranky?” (Hyperion, $22.95).
Crankiness due to time (lack of) and technology (too much of) is at the root of America’s rage, she says.
Take your cell phone, pager and Palm Pilot, for instance. You bought them for “convenience.” But now, you are interrupted any time, anywhere, over little things that add up to a constant feeling of urgency, emergency and overload.
All it takes is one minor inconvenience — a driver cutting you off on the highway, or one zooming into your parking place at the mall — and you’re angry. You’re feeling ripped-off. You’re raging.
“Technology has made life so convenient, we’ve lost our tolerance for inconvenience,” says Charles.
We’ve become, it seems, a nation with the attention span of a 2-year-old.
Charles has a prescription for chilling out. Before you buy the latest gadget (or puppy, for that matter), ask yourself, “Does this simplify or complicate my life?”
“If you constantly ask yourself that, then things begin to change,” she says.
Charles is a professional speaker on “workplace communication.” “I work with these desk-rage people,” she explains in a phone interview from her home in rural East Lansing, Mich.
She recommends doing something every day to “ease the pressure” — ranging from counseling (if you’re really miserable and don’t want to stay that way the rest of your life) to turning off the cell phone, having a no-TV night with the family or using the car as a “decompression chamber.”
“Have two drives home. If you’ve had a really horrible day, choose the longer route instead of the expressway,” she says.
If you don’t like Charles’ advice — and she admits that some people roll their eyes — you might want to try another expert. All of the rage over rage has fueled a cottage industry of motivational speakers, psychologists and been-there-can-lecture-on-that types hoping to minister to (or cash in on) the latest rage.
A Hartford Courant Internet query on rage yielded dozens of replies. We heard from people with advice on everything from anger management to coping with Type A personalities. There are classes on How To Spot a Hostile Employee and “therapeutic” CDs for road-rage relief (“clinically tested . . . music to survive the drive,” it promises).
But is rage genuinely on the upswing?
Scott Geller, a Virginia Tech psychology professor who studies human behavior, said the increase is real. “The issue is we are more frustrated today than we have been in the past. Psychologists have known for years that frustration leads to aggression. What causes frustration? Crowdedness, telephone recordings that ‘push one to be ignored, push two to be ignored again.’ We are in a quick-fix society. We want it fixed now, but in real life, it doesn’t happen that way,” he says.
Geller says that as America becomes more crowded, Americans are going to have to give up their everyone-for-themselves ways and adapt a more Japanese-like mentality.
Instead of screaming at the flight attendant about airport delays, “look at the bigger picture,” he says. “Look at how amazing it is that our transportation system can move so many people,” or, he suggests, chill out with the thought that “somebody else is being serviced right now.”
If all of this makes you pine for the good old days, sorry. There weren’t any. Rage might be one of those American ways that predate the computer age. Consider this observation by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville who traveled in the United States and wrote in 1840: “Americans . . . frequently allow themselves to be borne away, far beyond the bounds of reason, by a sudden passion or a hasty opinion, and sometimes gravely commit strange absurdities.”
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