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Love is what holds our households together, but love isn’t what gets things done — that’s annoyance. Behind love, annoyance is the marquee domestic emotion, the fuel that powers the home. Leonard Cohen called it “the homicidal bitchin’ that goes down in every kitchen,” which sounds about right. It’s also one of the last unexamined emotions in our age of therapy-speak. We think critically, even obsessively, about what causes our anger, disappointment, grief, shame, and anxiety, but the state of being annoyed is something we consider natural. We take it for granted and we don’t seek to better understand it — maybe because to do so would be annoying, and we’re already annoyed enough as it is, so why not just leave it alone?
If Gen Z is “the anxious generation,” call millennials the annoyed generation. To be middle-aged is to face a daily mountain of small annoyances. The idea that one should face that mountain with a smile is extremely annoying. “Whistle while you work” is for people with no inner life; being annoyed is healthy, a sign of intelligence. For many women in our 40s, a state of default annoyance hardens up like homemade slime left out overnight, and before we know it, it’s a sizable part of our personality. Is there anything wrong with this? Maybe, but I wouldn’t want to risk annoying every single person reading this by calling it for certain. I do know that while we try to exercise self-control or at least self-awareness for other emotions, when it comes to annoyance, we give ourselves full permission to feel and express it, no questions asked.
Here is a short list of things that annoyed me so far today: My husband leaves drawers open throughout the house, and although I have asked him to close them, he often does not. My children make a mess around the sink every single day with their toothbrushes, and I don’t clean it because that’s not my job, but I still don’t like it. My neighbors have never, ever shoveled the snow off the front stairs that we share. Ever. I lost my wallet three months ago (very annoying incident), so I canceled my cards, and every day I get a new email from some service provider informing me that the payment failed. I could certainly go ahead and update my billing info with my new card, but part of me doesn’t want to be paying for this shit in the first place (Disney Plus?), so I am protesting by avoiding doing so, which means more emails. I have many responsibilities — to my kids’ schools, to my community — that I cannot attend to because my job is too demanding of my time. I am at peace with this because I enjoy my work, but the reminders and nudges interrupt me constantly.
Disappointment is a part of annoyance. I am disappointed in myself for not being able to systematically streamline my life, and I am disappointed in my husband for not having internalized every bit of feedback I have given him over the past 20 years. I am disappointed in myself for allowing a pointless void to expand between my knowledge that exercise makes me feel good and my ability to get myself to the gym.
Perimenopause provides clinical cover for some of us: Annoyance is hormones leaving the body. But that explanation further precludes any curious engagement with what’s behind the annoyance itself. It’s true that I was less annoyed in my 20s than I am now, but I was also stupider then and didn’t have a family or really any responsibilities beyond paying my bills. What if the underlying cause of annoyance isn’t our age or the incompetence of our family members, but the very fact of sharing a life with other people? Does that make annoyance a privilege? Is it the opposite of loneliness?
If you go looking for research on annoyance — how people describe experiencing it, the history of its usage as a concept — what you’ll find are numerous studies about the effect of noise in dense urban environments. Noisy neighbors, the stress of living under a flight path, the tyranny of traffic noise — all of this has been found to cause measurable psychological distress. What you won’t find are any studies about domestic annoyance, or about what other emotions annoyance might be conveniently papering over. This only serves to convince me further that domestic annoyance is such a human universal that we consider it invisible or somehow too ordinary to wonder about.
I do wonder about it, though. Could annoyance be a social tool that humans have evolved to teach each other to be more considerate? If I shield my kids from my annoyance, will they grow up to be more annoying or less? If I let my annoyance fly too freely, will it cause them to shrink themselves down, avoiding me altogether? Or maybe our families can respect what annoys each other and try to adjust, everyone learning a little dance of care, like how trees in a forest do, in a phenomenon called crown shyness, where the canopies of neighboring trees adapt to each other by ceding space. This keeps them from getting their branches tangled up with one another and broken in the wind. If trees can learn to do it, can’t we?
The only way to learn that kind of gentleness is to have respect for annoyance itself. Annoyance erasure, then, would be a social problem, not a solution. I wonder whether the proliferation of technologies of convenience have distorted our ability to cope with annoyance, or have allowed us the illusion that we are entitled to a life free of irritation. So many of the tools we use today promise us frictionless experiences, and inevitably these systems encounter human error or they just don’t work. Having the promise of frictionless-ness rescinded is somehow worse than friction itself. Oh, shoot, the Family Hub Screen on your Samsung Smart Fridge is “unresponsive”? How much of your evening are you prepared to spend degrading your own intelligence by trying to fix this fake problem that, deep down, you don’t even care about, except you paid money for a service that now you’re angry to be denied?
Encouraged by these tools and by our culture at large to think of our lives as problems to streamline and optimize, small inconveniences can feel enraging — or even like moral failures. One of our culture’s many boring and too-often-repeated questions asks how we used to cope with finding our way around, or meeting up with friends, before smartphones. The answer is that our tolerance for small inconveniences was probably more robust then. Even if our lives have seemingly gotten less annoying in the past 20 or so years, our ability to cope with annoyance has probably trended downward too.
What if everyday annoyance is not actually a problem at all, but a precious and unimpeachable part of living with people we love? A couple of years ago, my therapist told me that I should let myself be angry more, and that expressing my annoyance at my family is not unkind — it’s necessary if I want to set boundaries around my time and energy. My therapist spoke with a heavy Italian accent and was brilliant, and I was intimidated by her (ideal dynamic for therapy, for me anyway). And she was right. I had made the mistake of thinking that being annoyed at my family was the same as being cruel. I can see how one can lead to another, but they are not inherently bound together.
As a friend said to me last week, “Everything bad is growing, and everything good is shrinking.” She was referring to her body, but it’s an observation whose application is universal. Yet the times we live in are distressing and scary, not annoying. Annoyance is an emotion for things we think we can control, not for systems of oppression. That’s what makes it domestic. However, we all know that domestic worlds and the world outside are points on the same map. Our attitudes — tolerance, tantrums — always start somewhere.
That line from Leonard Cohen that I referenced earlier is from a song called “Democracy,” which is without a doubt the most annoying form of government, operating as it does on the basis of everyone piping up with their grievances and opinions. Democracy forces power to be funneled through a million meetings, and nothing is more annoying than meetings, especially long ones, with long-winded participants, all of whom insist on being heard. You know who hates meetings? I bet you can guess. We avoid annoyance at our peril — autocrats and oligarchs will do the deciding for us if we can’t be bothered. For our lives to be truly frictionless, we would have to sacrifice everything that makes us human. Maybe annoyance is a sign that even after all the irritation and inconvenience that we endure while making a home, we still have some skin in the game.
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