January 27, 2012
On anger management and social media

My name is John Scholvin and I have an anger problem.

Along with rugged good looks and luxurious, silvery hair, I inherited a vicious temper from my dad. I wish it could have been his jump shot or golf swing, but instead, it’s the ability to go from idle to redline in a couple of milliseconds.

I’ve been working on managing it for twenty years. My anger has damaged me personally and professionally. It’s something I have to be continually aware of to subdue. I’ve become pretty good at keeping it under control over the years. Part of it is probably just age and a natural change in my endocrine chemistry. Beyond that, I have techniques for quelling the rage when it rises, techniques which work well if I apply them early enough. That’s tricky: when it happens, it happens fast, and when it gets to a certain point, there’s no dialing back.

The main thing I’ve learned is that the best way to handle it is to just avoid the triggers whenever possible. In real life, of course, it’s nearly impossible to use that tactic. Work seems to exist solely to test me. Irrational neighbors. Insane family. Fussy children. So for all these characters and more, I rely on my management techniques, and, mercifully, succeed more often than not.

The Internet at large, for the most part, is more easily managed by the avoidance technique. I stopped reading political blogs entirely a while ago, and I abandoned the comments sections on major media sites long before that. Nothing good is happening in those places. Years ago, I used to hang around and pick fights in spots like that. Got myself and others good and mad, had my life threatened a couple of times, you know, the usual. (Don’t bother googling, I used a pseudonym.) It was unhealthy so I let it all go. Best move ever.

But what’s a hot-tempered brother to do when people in his social media circles give him rage face? Again, avoidance is best. Facebook’s easiest: you can just hide those people, or when the good people do bad things, you can hide the post. That little ticker on the top kinda sucks when you see someone interacting on some loathsome Fan page or whatever, but they go by pretty quick and there’s not a lot of context, anyway. Twitter’s not bad, either. Avoidance works: you can see what you’re getting into before you follow it. If something changes, the social contract there isn’t too tightly binding, and unfollowing makes it all better.

Ah, but what of tumblr? Tricky, this. The avoidance principle applies, first. I simply don’t follow stuff that is clearly a horror show for me. But after you make the commitment to follow someone, and they follow you, too, it happens many times that some kind of relationship forms. It’s hard to explain directly, but I suspect most people who’ve been around a while know what I’m talking about [1]. For whatever reason, it seems to me, to unfollow someone here is a heavier activity than on Twitter, more akin to unfriending someone on Facebook which we’d probably agree is a fairly drastic step. But unlike Facebook, there is no way to give someone a timeout or mute any individual posts. (Maybe cutlerish should get on that.)

So, what to do when a person you otherwise care about puts something up that absolutely, positively enrages? Something that ignites a hot chemical fire in the lizard brain and immediately engages the fight or flight response? “Scroll past it, dumbass” is the obvious answer, and that’s reasonable, except for two problems: 1) I come back to the dash fairly often throughout the day and I’m likely to see it again and again, and 2) even if I decline to fight, odds are good some like-minded soul will reblog it with his own guns blazing, and there it is again.

Weeks can go by without this sort of thing happening. I’ve chosen wisely. But even if 0.01% of the stuff I see here triggers, there’s enough content streaming by that it will happen often enough, and as the laws of probability would have it, several such triggers came up here in rapid succession the other day. A cluster of clusterfuck. (No, I’m not going to say who/what.)

So I imposed a multi-day timeout on myself, which seemed the only reasonable thing to do before I started hurting feelings in a big way. I don’t want to be that guy. I was him, and I didn’t like him. And while I do still like to emit a good rant now and then (and I think most of you like them, too), you can imagine that if I decide to turn that firehose on someone in the community, it’s not going to be pretty. 

That’s it. Hi. Didja miss me? I promise that the next time something like this comes along, I will disappear and return without meta fanfare such as this. We now return you to funny cats and hawt GPOYs.

[1] This must seem extra tedious to those of you who are viewing this through the fourth wall, coming in directly or via RSS. Sorry about that. But you should think about setting up a tumblr for yourself and getting involved. The downside I mentioned here is really quite minor relative to the huge value of the community aspect of the platform. I’ve made real friends here, even some I’ve never actually met IRL. That’s unique and cool and a thing to be cultivated.

8:49am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZEG6ZyFS9_dc
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Filed under: meta tumblr Anger Management personal 
  1. smartgoat reblogged this from scholvin and added:
    anxiety rather than anger. When those trigger issues show up, they consume...constantly,...
  2. lefauxfrog said: I can relate to this. And I’ve slowly divorced myself from the following/unfollowing nonsense.
  3. kimalah said: Breaks are good mental health. <3
  4. do-over said: I have an anger problem, too. You know it makes us sexy as fuck, right?
  5. theungracefulone said: I AM SORRY I SO OPENLY PROFESSED MY LOVE FOR AARON RODGERS.
  6. frageelay said: I was just thinking about something similar today; there are a couple of woe-is-me/ranty friends I don’t want to unfollow b/c we’re friends. But soaking up their drama drains me. And I can’t get tumblr savior to work.
  7. rartastic said: I get it. good luck. see you in a few!
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