There’s a strange truth about human nature that becomes obvious once you see it: the people who make you angriest are the people whose opinions you secretly respect.Think about the last time someone online said something that made your blood boil. Maybe it was a political take, a criticism of something you love, or a dismissive comment about your field of work. Now think about the last time a confused tourist asked you for directions to a place that’s obviously marked, or a small child insisted that dinosaurs still live in the jungle. One of these probably made you frustrated or indignant. The other probably made you smile or feel patient.
The difference isn’t in the wrongness of the statement. It’s in whether you’ve granted the speaker the status of someone whose views actually matter.When someone you consider truly beneath your concern, someone operating so far outside your sphere of relevance that their thoughts couldn’t possibly affect you, expresses hatred or disagreement, you simply don’t care. You might find it amusing, you might feel a distant pity, but you don’t feel that hot rush of anger. You don’t compose paragraphs in your head explaining why they’re wrong. You don’t lose sleep. You just scroll past, or nod politely, or change the subject, because engaging would be like arguing with the weather.
Anger requires a kind of recognition. When someone’s opinion pierces you enough to provoke genuine fury, you’re implicitly acknowledging that they have the standing to hurt you. You’re admitting, however unconsciously, that their words carry weight in the social ecosystem you both inhabit. You’re treating them as a peer whose judgment could actually matter, whose perspective might influence others you care about, or whose validation you realize you wanted even if you’d never admit it.
This is why online arguments are so uniquely enraging. The internet has created a bizarre situation where we’re constantly exposed to opinions from people whose status relative to us is ambiguous. Is this person a respected voice in your field who should know better, or just someone shouting into the void? That uncertainty creates a tension. We get angry because part of us has granted them relevance, has placed them in the category of “people whose thoughts about the world matter,” even as another part of us wants to dismiss them entirely.
Consider how you react to genuine trolls, the ones who are so clearly performing chaos for its own sake. Most people learn to feel nothing about them. They’re not even worth blocking sometimes. But someone who seems sincere, who appears to genuinely hold the opposing view you find abhorrent, someone who might actually influence others or who seems to have a platform or credentials? That person can ruin your afternoon.
The most secure people, the ones who’ve truly internalized their own status and values, have a remarkable ability to remain unbothered. They can hear disagreement or even attacks and respond with bemused detachment or simply move on. It’s not that they’re unaware of criticism. It’s that they’ve genuinely placed the critic in a category of irrelevance. They’ve completed the calculation and determined that this person’s perspective doesn’t warrant emotional investment.
This is different from the performance of not caring, which is its own kind of status game. Genuinely not caring has a lightness to it. You can still engage if you choose to, but there’s no heat, no edge, no need to win. You might correct a misunderstanding the way you’d mention that someone has their shirt on backwards, as a neutral piece of information rather than a battleground.
The anger itself, then, becomes a form of respect, even if it’s grudging and hostile. You’re angry precisely because you can’t dismiss this person. They’ve forced their way into mattering to you, into the circle of voices you’ve decided carry weight. Your fury is the proof that they’re not beneath your notice, that they’ve achieved the status of someone whose opinions you have to contend with, even if only to reject them.
This doesn’t mean anger is always bad or that we should strive for cold detachment from everyone. Sometimes anger is appropriate and necessary. Sometimes people who matter to us, whose opinions we value, say things that demand pushback. But understanding this dynamic can be clarifying. The next time you feel that familiar rage building, you might pause and ask yourself: am I angry because this person is wrong, or am I angry because I’ve granted them the power to bother me? And is that power something I actually want to give them?Because true contempt, the kind that comes from seeing someone as genuinely beneath engagement, doesn’t look like anger at all. It looks like indifference. It looks like moving on. It looks like the face you make at spam email before you delete it without reading, at the scammer who calls about your car’s extended warranty, at the street preacher predicting the end times. These people may be saying things you disagree with intensely, but they can’t make you angry because you’ve already decided their opinions exist in a realm that doesn’t intersect with yours.
So the next time someone’s take makes you want to write a furious response, consider what you’re really revealing. Your anger might be justified, your counterargument might be right, but you’ve already told them something important: they matter enough to you that their words can hurt. You’ve granted them status. You’ve shown respect, even if it’s wrapped in rage. And sometimes, that recognition is exactly what they were looking for all along.
