You need to be more angry

You need to be more pissed off.

As men, we're told anger is a "bad" emotion — and with the toxic masculinity conversation dominating right now, that message has only gotten louder. I felt it young. Whenever I got angry, for whatever reason, it got shut down. I was told to hide it. So I shrunk myself, and I shrunk my emotions, to make the people around me more comfortable.

Here's the thing: making people comfortable was never actually my job. People should feel safe around you — safe meaning they can trust your character, trust that you won't turn on them, trust what you'll do under pressure. But safe isn't the same as comfortable. Comfortable means never being challenged, never hitting friction, never being told something they don't want to hear. That was never a promise I owed anyone, and it isn't one you owe anyone either.

Society correlates anger with violence, and honestly, sometimes it does go hand in hand — that part isn't a myth. But the truth I've come to since is that anger has been one of the biggest driving forces behind my own growth. That "fuck you, watch me" feeling is a catalyst for change. When you get sick enough of who you've been, that anger is what fuels you into becoming someone else — it's where conviction comes from. There's a level of hate toward the status quo — toward the comfortable, mediocre version of yourself you keep excusing — that's actually necessary for growth. The longer I've sat with this, the more I've realized anger is an underexplored emotion, and it carries a lot more power than we give it credit for.

To be clear: this isn't permission to walk around pissed off at the world, projecting that onto everyone around you — especially the people you actually care about. That's not strength, that's just leaking. But some situations call for exactly the fuel anger provides the soul, and pretending otherwise doesn't make you more evolved. It just makes you disconnected from a real part of yourself.

This comes back to being a dangerous man. If you're a man who stays passive with his emotions — if nothing ever actually gets to you — it's highly likely you don't stand for anything either. People will walk on you, because you don't carry enough anger or conviction to defend who you are and what you believe. There's no respect in that, and no honor in it either.

If you have real drive, real conviction, real morals — things will make you mad. That's not a flaw, that's proof you care about something. The difference between a dangerous man and an erratic one isn't whether he gets angry. It's what he does with it once he has it. The erratic man lashes out. He has no control over himself, and everyone around him pays the tax for that. The dangerous man takes the exact same anger and turns it into fuel — fuel that drives change, whether that change starts inside himself, moves through the people around him, or eventually fuels something bigger than either. Figure out how to control it, how to channel it, and use it to craft a better version of yourself.