If you take anger and remove the desire for violence, what's *left*? Other than, like, a chest ache, and an abstract intellectual belief that [entity] was wrong to do [thing].
On those rare occasions wherein I feel angry, the general feeling is desire to make life worse for the target coupled with disregard for personal negative consequences to doing so. There's no particular desire for violence-in-particular there for me; it wasn't until somewhere in my late teenagerhood that I figured out that the people who talked about wanting to punch people who angered them were being literal and not metaphorical, because that sort of desire-for-violence was so foreign to me.
(Four relatively-recent examples (e.g. from the last decade) of me trying to make people's lives worse when angry: trying to get the anger-inducing party kicked out of his admin role on Discord (unsuccessful), trying to escalate this one school office's bad policy decision from an obscure thing-only-the-affected-students-knew-about into a campus-wide PR mess (a friend talked me out of it on the grounds that it would be tactically counterproductive), being miscellaneously snarky and oppositional towards the anger-inducing party (successful), and bouncing a rubber ball in a loud-and-obnoxious manner in the anger-inducing parties' presence (successful).)
I still broadly prefer to not get angry—the "get my values altered to specifically want to make people's lives worse" part and the "disregard for personal negative consequences" part are both Unwelcome, and even if I ever end up in a circumstance where making someone's life worse is the my-unaltered-values-maximizing thing to do (e.g. for game-theoretic revenge reasons), I'd rather do it coldly and carefully rather than in the stupid low-foresight way anger drives me to—but anger-as-I-experience-it definitely has more socially-acceptable outlets than a version of anger associated purely with a drive towards violence would.
Is there an analogous thing here? Can people receive internal signals that their situation is unacceptably dangerous and they need to do something about it, signals which are often accurate and which they intellectually decide to take seriously by default, without experiencing the quale of anxiety? Is there a form of anxiety that asks politely?
I'm not sure about a single distinctive signal which does that thing, as opposed to its being a side effect of general reasoning about my situation coupled with general pursuit-of-my-values? I don't avoid COVID-19 due to being anxious about it (since I am, for the most part, not all that anxious about it); I avoid it because I've crunched the numbers and concluded that avoiding it is the my-values-maximizing thing to do. But then, anxiety isn't that sort of distinctive signal of needing-to-do-something for me, either; anxiety, for me, is a signal that I'm feeling internally conflicted or uncertain about what to do in a given situation.
(At school, I often would feel anxious before my tests, wondering whether or not I'd really studied and otherwise prepared enough. That anxiety would always fade as soon as the tests started, even with the in-theory-hardest part in front of me, because my options were limited enough that there was no longer any question of what to do; the answer was very clearly "do the test".)
no subject
On those rare occasions wherein I feel angry, the general feeling is desire to make life worse for the target coupled with disregard for personal negative consequences to doing so. There's no particular desire for violence-in-particular there for me; it wasn't until somewhere in my late teenagerhood that I figured out that the people who talked about wanting to punch people who angered them were being literal and not metaphorical, because that sort of desire-for-violence was so foreign to me.
(Four relatively-recent examples (e.g. from the last decade) of me trying to make people's lives worse when angry: trying to get the anger-inducing party kicked out of his admin role on Discord (unsuccessful), trying to escalate this one school office's bad policy decision from an obscure thing-only-the-affected-students-knew-about into a campus-wide PR mess (a friend talked me out of it on the grounds that it would be tactically counterproductive), being miscellaneously snarky and oppositional towards the anger-inducing party (successful), and bouncing a rubber ball in a loud-and-obnoxious manner in the anger-inducing parties' presence (successful).)
I still broadly prefer to not get angry—the "get my values altered to specifically want to make people's lives worse" part and the "disregard for personal negative consequences" part are both Unwelcome, and even if I ever end up in a circumstance where making someone's life worse is the my-unaltered-values-maximizing thing to do (e.g. for game-theoretic revenge reasons), I'd rather do it coldly and carefully rather than in the stupid low-foresight way anger drives me to—but anger-as-I-experience-it definitely has more socially-acceptable outlets than a version of anger associated purely with a drive towards violence would.
I'm not sure about a single distinctive signal which does that thing, as opposed to its being a side effect of general reasoning about my situation coupled with general pursuit-of-my-values? I don't avoid COVID-19 due to being anxious about it (since I am, for the most part, not all that anxious about it); I avoid it because I've crunched the numbers and concluded that avoiding it is the my-values-maximizing thing to do. But then, anxiety isn't that sort of distinctive signal of needing-to-do-something for me, either; anxiety, for me, is a signal that I'm feeling internally conflicted or uncertain about what to do in a given situation.
(At school, I often would feel anxious before my tests, wondering whether or not I'd really studied and otherwise prepared enough. That anxiety would always fade as soon as the tests started, even with the in-theory-hardest part in front of me, because my options were limited enough that there was no longer any question of what to do; the answer was very clearly "do the test".)