Grace and the Anger Economy
My beginning confession is that I’ve been looking at midterm election predictions more than I want to. Yesterday this led me to a senatorial candidate in Texas who mentioned “the rage economy.” Here's what the candidate said:
We all get angry on both sides, and no one’s life gets any better. And so it’s tragic because I think so many of us go to these platforms because we are searching for connection. And instead we fall into this broken business model that leaves us lonelier, leaves us more disconnected than when we hopped on the platform in the first place.
Suddenly, I was even more interested in this new-to-me phrase—the rage economy—than in the midterm elections. So I did what semi-compulsive people do and kept reading. It led me to an article by technology writer Carlos Perez, “The Anger Economy: How We’ve Traded Our Hearts for Swords.” In it, Perez maps out our subtle temptation to swap tender human emotions like sadness and grief for the immediate, empowering surge of anger. I kept digging and discovered that dopamine is involved. Of course it is.
Anger feels active. It feels strong. It turns a helpless feeling into a force. Our brains love it. But when we give ourselves over to rage we end up trading our best selves for a lesser version.
As Lisa and I were researching for our upcoming book, Pathways of Grace: Offering and Encountering God's Goodness in Helping Professions, we studied 153 interviews about how God’s grace breaks into ordinary lives. Among the four primary pathways that emerged from that research, attunement stands in stark contrast to the anger economy.
Blog posts are short, and need to be, so I’ll not try to unpack attunement here as we do in the book. But I will tell a story and offer a professional observation.
The Story...
relates to kayaking, which both Lisa and I write about in our blog posts (thankfully, we are more consistent with kayaking than we are with blogging).
Each Friday morning we head to the Willamette River to put our aging bodies in our aging kayaks. Invariably, one of us begins reciting Wendell Berry's The Peace of Wild Things, a poem we have both memorized. As we paddle, those familiar lines about coming into the presence of still water and resting in the grace of the world wash over us.
Berry's response to the despair of the world is to "go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water." That seems a better response than rage.
We offer this view of attunement in Pathways of Grace.
To be attuned is to shift our internal frequency until it matches the reality around us—to move from the noise of our own expectations into a resonant alignment with the present moment, with creation, and ultimately with God.
Fridays on the water offer us moments of attunement, moments of grace, as we float away from our computers and the media, social and otherwise, that seem so intent on stirring our souls in service of dopamine. We center into a place where grace gentles us like quiet ripples on the water.
Sure, there is a place for anger, but attunement feels more fully human than rage ever will.
The Professional Observation...
reminds us that attunement requires neither poetry nor rivers.
Lisa and I wrote Pathways of Grace for helpers, including counselors, psychologists, pastors, and spiritual directors. In this context, attunement is resonant alignment. It is the act of shifting our internal frequency until it matches the reality of the present moment, the needs of the other, and the presence of God. Stillness is an essential tool to allow this alignment to happen.
We cannot possibly stay deeply attuned to a client, parishioner, or friend when our own nervous systems are primed for conflict. Whenever we allow the pervasive reactivity of the culture around us to saturate our soul, our capacity for attunement shrinks.
If the anger economy runs on rapid reaction and caricature, attunement is its direct inverse. Attunement is the slow, embodied discipline of staying present to another human being, listening deeply, sitting with their complexity, and holding space without needing to immediately judge or fix or fight.
Reclaiming attunement is a subversive spiritual discipline as we refuse to let an outrage-driven culture dictate our lives.
Even among the best-intentioned folks dedicated to justice and advocacy, it is remarkably easy for a prophetic voice to drone on in continuous, digital contempt. Before we realize it, we find ourselves chronically hyper-vigilant, carrying heavy swords while the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water.
And it is exhausting us.
• • •
Lisa and I explore attunement more fully in our forthcoming book, Pathways of Grace: Offering and Encountering God's Goodness in Helping Professions (coming June 8, 2027, from IVP Academic). The other pathways are brokenness, suffering, and kindness.
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