Dictionaries For the Soul
Okay, I swear I'm not vagueposting here; this is just something I've been thinking about today.
Is there a word in any language for this concept:
"Becoming angry when being asked to do something inconvenient but completely reasonable"
If not, I think it's a word whose time has come. I've seen it happen to many people, and I've seen it in myself. I see it in the response to taxes and regulations, and it is a response that we tend to dismiss, pretend didn't happen, or call hypocritical. But is it really hypocritical if it's a nearly universal response? Humankind has a tendency to ignore ("turn a blind eye") or condemn ("projection") traits we don't like to see in ourselves, but maybe this is something we need to understand and process collectively, something like jealousy.
It does seem humanitarian to accept that inconvenience is aggrevating, even if the inconvenience is for the common good and even if the inconvenience isn't all that inconvenient. From time to time, who doesn't say "the world is against me" for the flimsiest of reasons? But we can empathize with that impulse while still politely insisting that other people act accordingly. That's the essential element of society. We insist on inconveniences that seem reasonable, and over time we realize that some things that seemed reasonable actually aren't, and vice versa, and adjust accordingly.
A lot of times those adjustments in reasonableness can seem obvious in hindsight, which can be embarrassing. So, maybe we can add "embarrassed" to the "angry" in my proposed word definition above. Embarrassment is nearly anger directed inward, anyway.