So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.

Revelation 3:16

In our culture, the feeling of anger has a bad reputation, and this is not entirely without reason. Anger, after all, often comes across as distasteful or rude. It is seen as unproductive, or immature, like a pouting child when he doesn’t get any sweets. It’s conflated with angst, or the excesses of hormones. Ultimately, it is often represented as something completely void of purpose or use. Far better than anger is a kind of stoic indifference, going with the flow, or shining optimism. Certainly, this is sometimes true. Anger is not always expressed in helpful—much less healthy—ways. More importantly, one should not forget to look on the bright sides of life: there are, of course, many great things that life has to offer us. Anger can definitely trap you in a kind of loop, and this should be avoided, lest you waste away your life like that. So, imagine my surprise when a certain book caught my eye called The Gift of Anger, written by Gandhi’s grandson. The Gandhi family name is not something I would typically associate with “anger”, so this prompted me to reflect. And having thought about it, I’ve realised something: these “anger is bad” type people really piss me off.

These glass-half-full c***s, I never liked them. You know what I mean? I never met a successful glass-half-full c***. You’ll never be anything if you think the glasses are full. If you want to get ahead in this world, walk in the room and go: “Why isn’t that fucking glass full!?”

Jim Jefferies in Freedumb

Optimism is useful in getting us through a tough time. When someone is at rock bottom, optimism is great for helping them to make the best of every moment, even if the “best” life has to offer really isn’t that great. There’s nothing wrong with this. Telling someone to “look on the bright side” is an encouragement to seek the good things, and how could anyone be blamed for that? The good things are what we live for, are they not? For this reason, I’m very fond of Abba’s lyric, “Without a song or a dance, what are we?” Life can be complete shit. You can be alone, hate your 9-5, live in a garbage dump, and whatever else, but play a song or share a dance, and you’ll find something that (strangely enough) makes life at least somewhat bearable, despite the fact that nothing in life changes. There is a benefit to the “glass half-full” point of view.

However, there are limits to what optimism can offer us. For just as it can be a good thing, optimism can also make us lazy. If someone is told, “things will get better,” they might suppose this happens naturally, as if this is simply the trend of human experience. Unfortunately, for many people, this is not true. Things don’t always get better. For some people, things get worse—be it their own fault, or that of the circumstances of the world around them. Sometimes, the tides of fate have other plans, and things just don’t go as we’d hope or even as we’d expected. And what happens when life doesn’t go as expected and deals us a crap hand? As you may have guessed, we can get very pissed off.

God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

From Good Omens (emphasis not mine)

Now, here’s where things get tricky. It’s easy to only be angry, and live entirely out of that feeling, which is toxic. However, this is not the only purpose anger serves. Anger can be a motivating force for change. If some perceived injustice in the world pisses you off, you’ll find a lot of strength to go out and change it. It is important that your actions are not, of course, entirely out of anger, however; and this rather neatly ties into my second point. Anger can often be a clue as to where we feel pain and what we value. If I am angry about something, it is not because I don’t care about it. On the contrary, I do. I care very much. And this might prompt further questions, such as why do I care, and why am I angry about it? Therapists would probably like this point. When one reflects on their anger, they begin to discover something that matters to them far more than the feeling itself. These are areas that need healing, which can be attended to for personal growth. Anger is a great thing because it points those areas out to you, and from there, you can begin to be a better you.

But anger is passionate, sometimes unrelenting. Trying to break through these layers of hurt might feel like fighting a war against yourself, and the trouble is that you cannot fight this war in the ordinary way. For as in any war, there are casualties, and when there is civil war, those casualties will be right at your own doorstep. So, this war cannot be won in any conventional sense. Indeed, it is simply a metaphor, but there is warfare that leaves the enemy helpless, though not vanquished; and this is how you win the war against your own anger. After all, you won’t win if you’re angry that you’re angry. And so, ironically this other breed of warfare is often described as the “cruelest”, and in saying that, I think we’ve all begun to understand what it is.

Love. That’s all there is to it.