Anger, Anxiety and Agency

I’m not the arbiter of emotions but being angry is valid and it doesn’t have to be directed. It’s not necessarily a vector. If I worked very hard to transplant a tree, and at no fault of anyone, it dies in the process, I can be angry I invested my time, money and energy into the failed effort. No one has the right to say that’s the wrong emotion to feel.

The record scratch for me here was the idea that people can choose to be unsure instead of angry.

People hate being unsure. Neurochemistry prefers anger to uncertainty. People get angry about being unsure. We feel anger in large part as our brain's natural salve for the discomfort of uncertainty. The suggestion he's making sort of defines away human nature.

(There's a lot of practical benefit to be gained from understanding this; for instance, skilled consultants put a price tag on certainty; you can sell determinism by itself, separate from any product or service you're more overtly offering.)

I was taught that anger isn't an emotion. It's a reaction -a defensive surge of adrenaline, binary thinking, and motivation to fight. It can feel empowering and energizing. We aren't just sitting here. We're gonna do something.

The emotion is fear. Anger is just a reaction to fear. Basically, if we are angry, we are also scared; whether or not we want to admit it.

It's a long topic, and one I know well (I agree with the above summary), but I really don't think that discussing it, would be particularly welcome, here. I know that it isn't often welcome, even with folks that ask to hear it.

I've spent the majority of my adult life, learning to curb and sideline anger. In my experience, my anger has always caused problems. It has never solved a problem.

Ever. Not even one single problem.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

It's just drained my energy, stunted my reasoning, and poisoned relationships. It has caused others to strike back at me, when they didn't need to (which, of course, caused me damage), it has caused problems, where none existed before, and magnified existing ones.

We can't help getting angry, but we sure can help staying angry. That "staying" part is the corrosive agent. Anger is meant to be a temporary burst of energy, to deal with a threat. After the threat has (or has not) been dealt with, anger is supposed to dissipate. It's not supposed to be an "at rest" state (unless you're Bruce Banner).

I think right now I love my job. I can work 5 times faster and explore all the little things that I never had time for. All my side projects suddenly come to fruition!

But I have never been more anxious. I have a hard time sleeping, I constantly feel the need to keep up or fall behind. It didn’t use to be like this.

> I’m afraid we’re completely ignoring the impact this has on society at large, the climate, and the balance of the world as a whole.

Who's we? The impact this has on society at large is such an enormous, pervasive topic in my life - headlines in city newspapers, conversation at the dinner table - that I feel like you'd have to be living in a bunker to think nobody is engaging with it. This guy comes across as entirely disconnected from the world, but somehow thinks he knows how people who actually live in it should feel.

I think it's more a mix of anxiety, frustration, and exploration.

Exploration: Hey there's some cool new tech, let's see what it can do for me, for us.

Anxiety: What will happen to my craft? Will my skills still be important? Will I have a job in a year? How will I keep up? If we stop or slow hiring junior engineers, what happens when the experienced folks retire?

Frustration: This could be a time of fun and exploration with these new tools at hand. Instead we are measured by weird metrics (tokens, PR times, etc, etc), some of us are laid off, etc. There are $100bns spent on AI data centers.

The last one is the closest to anger, but it's not really the same.

As far as I can tell, we've convinced companies and VCs to dump billions of dollars into infrastructure to support a vision where they can get more done with fewer people. They've been duped.

I think of LLMs as a labor-liberating tool. It's saving me effort so I don't have to drudge through enterprise codebases and memorize company-specific knowledge that is a dead end for my career. Instead I can run an agent while doing chores.

The beauty of the entire LLM stack is that it requires us. It is useless without a human-in-the-loop. The entire stack is designed around human intervention. We will not magically invent a way to remove the human without first removing it from training.

So rest assured, so long as there are humans in the training loop, there's nothing to worry about, because LLMs are a cybernetic enhancement, not a replacement.

Recent and related:

Never Be Angry at Work - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49396811 - Aug 2026 (14 comments)

Andrew Huberman has this idea about Duration, Path, and Outcome.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CHLavYHn-BG/?hl=en

Duration - how long will things take?

Path - how will we get there?

Outcome - what's at the end, or how I think of it, what does done look like or where do I want to be?

Things like anger and anxiety are IMO, when our brains take an unfortunate offramp instead of solving for these. I've used this as a analytical framework to calm myself and make a plan to get out of a jam many times: physical pain, pressure-cooker work stress, interpersonal conflicts.

I have also had significant success using it as mini-framework to help break down problems people have come to me with. There's a lot to emotions in general far beyond "psychologists HATE this one trick" - don't let me oversell it, but it immediately came to mind reading the article.

All the communities that have high-anxiety seem to have universal high-anxiety. It's not that they have high-anxiety about AI but low-anxiety about dating. Or high-anxiety about loneliness but low-anxiety about AI. So realistically it seems to me that this lack of discrimination in the communities means that the communities are high-anxiety or low-anxiety. I just block everyone (using a Chrome extension) who has this kind of pathological behaviour and that removes this kind of repetitive whining from my social feeds. Raises SNR substantially for online comments.

Good article! I agree that curiosity is a wonderful place to land.

However, I think putting anger and curiosity on two levels can be a subtle trap. It can lead to diminishing the importance of anger. They’re all just emotions; just appearances in our minds. We don’t decide when they show up, but we do have the capacity for awareness.

In my experience I’ve found anger to be an immensely important emotion. It signals to me that something very important needs attention. And when entire populations are angry, that’s a really important signal. Granted, following the first thought that follows the anger tends to be unhelpful (it’s easy to villainize). But the initial signaling of importance should not be underplayed.

Wait wait wait. I don’t accept this premise: “But anger is different from anxiety because anger needs to be directed somewhere.” Citation needed; where did this come from? I think it is very possible to be angry without a source or obvious target of that anger; IANAP but my 10-minute googles could not find any authority in the field that would claim this statement.

From the perspective of the article, it seems that not having a target distinction between anxiety and anger would make the two feelings indistinguishable and thus the argument would fall apart. BUT, I do think there is a difference between the rage that comes from anger and the unease that comes from anxiety, and that may be triggered by the uncanny valley feelings from AI or the loss of job security from AI or the feelings of replacement that may come from AI or the environmental concerns that come from AI or the capitalistic underpinnings of the current implementation of AI, the list goes on. Some people may take anxiety from these things, and others may take anger. I don’t see one emotion as being less valid than the other.

Also, I don’t see any use in saying someone shouldn’t be angry or anxious in a particular situation. You can’t control your emotions like that. You can control how you _react_ to your emotions, but not the emotions themselves. I do think that emotional regulation is important in work (and also in life), but that doesn’t mean that you don’t feel what you feel.

Anger seems to me is a form of self protection, splitting from frustration and articulation of one's own needs. If frustration reaches a certain threshold, anger pops up and explodes. Happy to read what everyone thinks about this

> Who are you going to be angry at and why are you angry in the first place? One narrative that is pretty pervasive is that if AI will usher in productivity gains, those gains are going to benefit companies rather than employees. And well at least someone at Meta wants that. > [...] > My answer to the question of how you can not be angry in tech is that it’s by no way the most only possible feeling. First of all, instead of being angry, you can simply be unsure. The feeling of uncertainty is a much more productive emotional state because it can lead to curiosity.

With respect to Armin, whose work I respect a lot, I think that it is totally valid and in fact productive to reserve a degree of anger and hatred for the hyper-capitalists that are going to use AI to further make the lives of the many worse to further entrench the power of a very, very few.

It is very true that being entirely consumed by anger is bad. At the extremes, it clouds judgment, is bad for your health, and makes you little fun at parties. That said, it's a human emotion and being upset by injustice helps fuel action.

So insofar as we're called to being uncertain and curious, it should perhaps be uncertainty about our current social/class structure and curiosity about how we might change it for the better. If you have the means and the talent, maybe start a worker owned tech co-op. If that doesn't seem likely maybe start talking about organizing a union. Remember when folks said that if tech workers would you unionize, it would upset the good things folks had with wages? Well if tech workers had unionized earlier on, the precarity and anxiety workers feel today might not have come to pass. If now seems like a bad time to unionize, a future where AI usage is more pervasive and better understood might be much worse.

Anger and anxiety are normal responses to abnormal and dangerous situations. They should not be changed or ignored, they should be used.

This is the same game. They tried to play with the mindfulness movement in tech. Ignore your anger and just keep coding. And that’s why everyone is more angry and anxious now.

There's something that really rubs me the wrong way when people use the language of healthy emotional regulation to spread unearned and unjustified placation.

It reminds me of (for the pedants out there, I'm not saying it's equivalent to) the consume product meme. "Don't ask questions, just complete assignment and then get excited for next industry trend."

>I don’t know what the future of this industry will look like, and I don’t know who will benefit from it and I don’t think I’m alone with that. However I can only urge anyone who feels anger and looks for a villain right to instead remain curious instead. To be curious enough to understand what is changing, excited enough to experiment with it. And then, from what we learn, earn the right to decide when resistance is warranted and where to direct it.

Sounds pleasant and vaguely inspirational. Then you read it again and notice guy thinks I don't always have the RIGHT to DECIDE to RESIST.

Maybe it's AI psychosis speaking but how can you not be excited? You can outsource virtually all electronic drudgery for $100/mo.

I haven't been this excited about tech since I set up my first home server 20+ years ago. And Claude doesn't sounds like an always-on vacuum cleaner (it was a decommissioned proliant).

> Even if you don’t find what’s happening right now exciting, you can at least find it interesting

I can't get myself to stop finding it terrifying

When I think about my future I am scared. Not uncertain. Not merely anxious. Definitely not excited. I'm quite frightened.

In fairness, I think I'm a bit of an outlier. I already felt my place in society was fairly tenuous. I struggle to make friends. I don't feel I fit in very well. I've never managed to stick at one job for more than a few years. The one thing I'm really quite good at is building software and that's let me stay afloat and thrive somewhat

And that's going to go away. And I'm nowhere near close to retiring.

So no. I'm probably not going to find a way to let my anger give way to curiosity any time soon. I feel under threat and I am scared for my personal future safety and security.

Is this my fault for placing too many of my eggs in one basket? Yeah probably. I regret it a lot. If I could go back in time I would have chosen a different profession and branched into software instead of being all software all the time.

I'm trying to tell myself it's not too late to branch out now, but it's been very difficult

So.. I dunno. I can appreciate what the article is saying, and I think it's probably accurate and useful for other people who are more secure than I am, but... Eh.

I guess I just hope people realize that people like me are out there, not just uncertain but AI is shaping up to be the blow that knocks us off the bridge and into the water

It is a real shame that yet another previous open source blogger uses his social credit and influence to manipulate programmers. People figure it out quickly these days.

Telling the peasants to suppress anger is the primary means of the ruling classes to induce inaction.

Righteous anger is a healthy and natural response. Those who admonish others to "be curious", to "wait and see", to "be rational" often have an agenda.

Like this author who is invested in AI.