I am trying to imagine your mental state as you read this. Perhaps your children are screaming. Perhaps the milk you used to make your coffee was dubiously sour. Did you wake up and look at your phone, which promptly delivered you some of the worst news possible, from indiscriminate locations across the world, instantly from the palm of your hand to your retinas? Perhaps you clicked off news websites and looked at emails that you shouldn’t read until Monday morning. Perhaps you quickly opened Instagram, to look at the stories of people you don’t like, purely to scratch an itch. And then X (Twitter), where you read apoplectic or sarcastic takes about the news stories you just heard about five minutes ago. How are you feeling? Yes, bad.
Or not just bad. Pissed off, perhaps, or filled with rage. We are in the midst of a rage epidemic, after all. It doesn’t just feel like everyone is angrier than they used to be: they are. The world is a rage-fuelled and rage-filled place. Last year, polling company Gallup published the Global Emotions Report to take the temperature on the positive and negative emotional and mental health of people around the world. The picture they painted was sobering: anger around the world has been on the rise, they found, since 2016. In fact nearly a quarter of their respondents (23 per cent) reported feeling angry every day. Although anger was understandably highest in areas of war, genocide, extreme poverty and civil unrest, even in supposedly peaceful and prosperous countries, levels of rage were simmering. In the UK, 17 per cent of people reported daily anger. In the US, 18 per cent said the same.
