I've also referred to this as grief/grievance.

Grief is the process of mourning and integrating a loss.

Grievance is the anger and resentment about something that can't be changed for you personally.

I'm not sure where anger that drives people to make productive systemic and social change fits into that framework.

I like the pairing and similarity of the words grief vs grievance.

I don't know that the dumb brain would distinguish its anger response between things that can be maybe changed and can't be changed, though.

The idea that anger is almost always just covering up some other emotion seems nuts to me. Of course there are lots of things to be rightly angry about. I'd go so far as to say that if you're not at least a little bit angry about some things (global warming for instance, or the murder of George Floyd), there's something wrong with that lack of emotional response.

Sometimes anger is the emotion that's being covered up, not covering up something else. Either way, whatever's being covered up, it's probably a good idea to give it some focused attention.

With the idea that anger is depression turned outward and vice versa - it's probably important to remember that these are kind of just word games. These emotions are things we experience in our bodies and brains, and it's those experiences that are real, and then we use words to try to label and understand the relationships between them, but people with different languages and cultures would use different words that structure their understanding differently. Like, we say "anger," but what if we had a language that had fifty words for different emotional experiences that all fit within the general concept of being angry? Maybe there are just many kinds of anger that do different things for different people under different circumstances. One angry person joins a movement for social justice, another one rants on the internet, another one prays, another one donates, another one beats his spouse, another one joins the military, etc.

That's a great pseud.

I agree with 3. And 4 for that matter.

I've also heard that anger is depression turned outward

May not accurate all the time, but I suspect it's true a lot of the time. In watching imaginary people on the internet interact, it's been a pattern over the years that someone who is perpetually angry/unpleasant in their interactions will admit in their calmer moments that they have or suspect they have serious depression and that the online aggro stuff is a way of dealing with it.

And there's macro causes versus micro causes for anger. Ie you're a simmering pot, and then a proximal event causes you to boil over. Perhaps sometimes the depression is the simmering pot, and the proximal event causes the "NO CHANGE IT BACK" anger response.

Lovely post, certainly resonates with me, definitely bad external circumstances turn up a dial that means either depression or hostility are more frequent for me. Thich Nhat Hahn wrote a book I like a lot with the title Anger. He knew Thich Quang Duc, whose self-immolating photograph is familiar to many of us, hard to imagine being Vietnamese then.

Conversely, although it's allegedly been discredited, there's a school of thought which says that depression is anger turned inwards. I think I've seen this in people who were discouraged as children from articulating their anger and asking for what they want.

It's a sine wave, cycling between anger and depression. The speed of the cycles measures how much it hertz.

hyperbole like that will lead discourse into unpromising tangents.

4,5: Thanks. Yeet is a fun word.

6: I think depressed people do that sort of online aggro stuff because anger can feel exciting and satisfying for a moment. Depression makes it hard to find enjoyment or satisfaction in life, so sometimes you want to do something that gives you a momentary burst of energy, even if it's really empty or self-destructive. (I'm speaking from past experience of intermittent mild-to-moderate depression, not from experience of being an internet jerk.)

I wonder if 12.2 has a gendered component... I honestly don't know, though. I have all kinds of unsubstantiated pop-psych ideas about gender and depression, about depression being a response to low social status that is in some ways adaptive and in some ways not (but in most social settings in most societies, it's going to be more sustainable/persistent for people coded feminine). My vague hypothesis is that being aggro can be a path to higher status for men in broader contexts than it can for women. I guess I can imagine some scenarios for women where expressing righteous hostility online would get you out of a funk, but you'd sure have to pick the right context to mitigate the risks. I become profoundly, inanely risk-averse when depressed.

(BTW, I'm going to be pretty intermittent as a commenter for a while because of competing demands, so let me issue a blanket expression of sympathy and well-wishes for everyone's misfortunes over the past and next 3 months or so. I do care and I'm probably thinking of you even if I am silent.)

My wife endlessly picks fights and trolls online as a leisure activity, and most of her online social circle is other women she met engaged in the same activity, so I'm pretty skeptical of any strongly gendered description of this kind of behavior.

Does she do it to alleviate depression, though?

I'm sure you're right to be skeptical, but to be clear, I was thinking of this particular path of stirring shit up to get out of a depressive funk, not of trolling in general, which is universal to humanity.* It's not my style, for sure. Even the slightest disagreement online makes me want to die ten times in sequence.

* this is a joke

No it doesn't.

I had to, before Moby wrote it.

Instead of commuting on the bus and commenting, I now take a nap after work.

By way of explaining why you beat me.

There must be some common ground we can find in which to inter my corpse.

No there isn't.

I blame myself.