Why anger?

On writing a book about the least understood emotion

As the historian Mary Beard has pointed out, ‘anger’ is the very first word in western literature. Homer started The Iliad with the title ‘The Wrath of Achilles’, before telling a story of blood, guts and violence that would make Quentin Tarantino blush.

It’s also the subject of one of the earliest surviving texts on philosophy, and arguably the first self-help book. Seneca’s On Anger, written in AD45, was an instruction to rise above the ‘madness’ of rage. The fact he’d witnessed the bloody four-year reign of Caligula – an Emperor who died hacked to pieces by his own troops and was mad enough to have, at one point, declared war on the sea – might help explain his perspective.

To this day, most books on the subject of anger are aimed at people who have the same problem as Achilles or Caligula: having too much of it. They tend to have bright red letters on the front and use words like' ‘control’, ‘stop’ and ‘overcome’. They’re to help the people we like to tut and shake our heads at – or just secretly film for TikTok – who lose their temper and make a scene in public.

The too-much-anger people are definitely a nuisance. And for a long time, I believed not being one of them meant I didn’t have to think about my relationship with it. Then I started getting help for anxiety and depression, and began to realise not knowing how to express or even recognise anger was a huge part of the problem.

It got me thinking. Why do we so often conflate anger with violence and aggression, when they are completely separate things? Why do we only ever talk about anger when it’s in surplus, instead of in a deficit? And where is anger in the #mentalhealth and wellness conversation? The answer is usually nowhere, possibly because it is a hard sell.

Despite this, when I started studying the psychologists, scientists, philosophers and business experts who engage with the positive sides of anger, I began to realise they were in on a secret: that turning towards rather than away from this uncomfortable emotion is a source of power and wisdom. That’s what Good Anger – and this newsletter – will explore. If you’d like to hear more ahead of it being published next year, please subscribe.