## Metadata - Author: [[will-rees|Will Rees]] - Full Title:: In Praise of Irritation - Category:: #🗞️Articles - Document Tags:: [[psychology|Psychology]] [[psychology|Psychology]] - URL:: https://aeon.co/essays/a-meditation-on-irritation-a-feeling-in-search-of-causes?utm_source=rss-feed - Finished date:: [[2023-04-29]] ## Highlights > The irate know their claims against the world to be baseless or at least wildly exaggerated, and this, too, annoys them ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz67dwxcnemnw4pkvpsd12yd)) > irritation is a feeling in search of causes ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz67e3d4hwpcxpr4dmkvdahp)) > irritation passed between us like a ball, both of us insisting that nothing at all was the matter. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz67fcxa5h6zazcfjkyx155z)) > Indeed, there seems to be nothing one can *do* with one’s irritation; and the usual solutions – breathe, count to 10, *relax* – have the unfortunate quality of being themselves very irritating ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz67msty3ar2s6ay4kv5vgmb)) > Even when it’s directed at others, irritation is generally an antisocial feeling, a conversation with oneself. This is probably because irritation’s gripes tend to be so superficial as to be virtually incommunicable: one is irritated by how a person speaks, their tone or timbre, rather than by what is actually said. While anger burns and sadness wounds, irritation’s lesions are skin deep. How could anyone be expected to take them seriously? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz67pwwy6ch88zqz5pe5c23d)) > [Friedrich Nietzsche](https://aeon.co/essays/what-nietzsche-learnt-from-diogenes-the-cynic) was disparaging about the tendency to keep our eyes trained exclusively on the depths, blinding us to the variety shimmering at ‘the surface … and the skin’, and in *The Gay Science* (1882) the irascible philosopher celebrates those who are superficial ‘out of profundity’. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz67s7310rbhf3x89aznfksg)) > We might imagine irritation to resemble Keats’s negative capability, or Freud’s evenly suspended attention: a relaxation of the claim to already know the difference between what is important and what is trivial. Irritation, then, might become a form of generalised attunement, even curiosity, in which closure is only one option ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz6822nqdnq8xp7e301b87ke))