Why You Should Feel Rage at Work
Cultivating anger can be a professionally valuable quality
Here’s the best question my research never asked: what makes you mad at work? My questions for interviewees focused instead on professional overwhelm, probably because professional anger seems like a negative emotion. It might be okay to feel overwhelmed. It’s feels far less okay to rage.
Why is anger generally against the rules in the workplace?
Anger looks unintelligent. Workplaces tend to prioritize reason over emotion, facts over feelings. Martha Nussbaum notes that feelings are “suffused with intelligence and discernment” (Upheavals in Thought 1). But for most of us anger does not make us look smart. When I get mad, my lips tremble. My eyes fill. My words disappear. Wrath can look silly. Which is another way of saying that anger makes you look vulnerable. Which is not cool at work.
Anger looks confusing. As neurophysiologist Lisa Feldman Barrett says, it’s difficult to scan other people’s feelings. What looks like joy might be fear, what looks like hope might be wrath. To add to the confusion, we’re often bewildered by our own emotions. One consultant for this newsletter told me, “A few years ago I found myself avoiding someone because I thought they were mad at me, but when I thought through the situation I realized I was the one who was mad.”
Anger looks risky. Nussbaum (cited above) has detailed the dangers of anger. Thicht Nhat Hanh writes in his book Anger that when we get mad, our house is on fire. Instead of trying to put out the flames, we often chase an alleged arsonist down the street. In an age of workplace violence, anger is risky.
But for all that, I do think there’s a kind of anger that’s indispensable in the workplace. I’m not talking simply about “getting mad” or losing your temper. I’m not talking about being antagonistic or contrary or quarrelsome. I am not even talking about being mad with any particular person. Instead, I’m talking about rage against the way things are.
That’s the mode/switch I’m recommending for this week: a shift from interpersonal anger to environmental anger.
As you may have noticed, I put out a question on Substack Notes about anger at work. I texted and emailed rising professionals to ask the same question. One respondent wrote, “I would say I don’t often feel anger at work… I’m not a particularly angry person… but I feel this simmering rage in me all the time…not so much about individual situations, it’s about systemic issues.” That “simmering rage” is what I’m talking about here as environmental. It’s a profound sense that things are not as they should be.
Celeste Condit’s book Angry Public Rhetorics identifies the limits of collective anger, especially in its tendency to narrow thought and exclude people. But she also takes anger with a seriousness that I wish managers would more often consider. Myisha Cherry’s new book Failures of Forgiveness showed up in Anne Helen Peterson’s Substack recently recently. She interviewed Cherry about why we’re wrongly afraid of anger. We sometimes want to get past anger, because we’re afraid of conflict. You saw me talking about Thich Nhat Hanh’s book above.
Another Mode/Switch reader, who’s a bilingual speech and language therapist, wrote to say that what’s been making her mad at work lately is “when other professionals ask me to do part of their job.” Sometimes, her coworkers will ask her to make a call to a Spanish-speaking parent. No problem, really, “"especially if you're a staff member that acknowledges this is a favor and not part of my job.” The other day, though, the therapist was given a task—translating a document—that has nothing to do with her job description. To make things worse, the coworker “acted like this was a normal request.” The therapist noted, “I felt anger on two levels—first, a little pettily, that you think my time is claimable for not-my-job tasks, and second, that you're not looking for your own tools to make communication with bilingual parents sustainable, which is definitely part of your job.”
Notice the bi-level shift there from interpersonal to environmental anger. She felt interpersonal frustration with colleagues who give her work that’s really theirs to do. Pretty understandable. But also, pretty unremarkable. Disagreements about task-delegation are a frequent feature of workplace life, and it’s probably not helpful to get big mad on a random Tuesday because you have this extra thing to do. But notice that the therapist also felt environmental anger when she realized that her colleagues should respect their Spanish-speaking clients enough to obtain a measure of language proficiency. As members of the majority culture, they don’t have to deal with the language barrier. So they don’t.
I’m recommending that managers and coworkers cultivate awareness for environmental anger because there’s something honest and vital about systemic wrath. It can be frustrating for people in power to realize that their workers (whom they are probably genuinely trying to support) are feeling smooshed by systemic inequities. But we all need to see that rage and slowly learn to feel it, because it animates renewal. When describing “a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being,” Audre Lorde recommends, not a flaring hostility or an unpredictable quarrelsomeness, but “a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.”
One final note that Halloween makes me think of. All the costumes that fill our workplaces and neighborhoods recall the potential theatricality of everyday emotions. There is such a thing as performative outrage, a costume of hostility that actually doesn’t care about the injustice it seems to protest. But at the end of the day, you can slip out of performative anger, like a kid shedding a costume to get to the candy pile on the living room floor. But environmental anger can’t be so easily shed. This steady, unyielding, often tacit opposition to gender-based, sex-based, race-based discrimination is not a Mad Employee Costume but a posture constantly facing a better workaday world than the one we have.
-craig
Listen While You Work: Sometimes there’s nothing to do with workplace frustration but put in your earbuds and play the tunes. Andrea Munday helped the Mode/Switch Team gather some songs to listen to when you’re feeling made enough for some unsanctified language. (Listener discretion advised.)
