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I think there might be a couple of things going on here:
1. Slightly differing definitions of what constitutes 'angry', and
2. Dramatically varying subjective experiences of anger. For example, in the case of #1, I usually separate 'frustration' from 'anger', but I could see someone else bundling them together. They share a lot of physiological effects, but I generally think of anger as a more focused and directed feeling. I could be frustrated while failing to debug something, but not meaningfully angry, because the bug is not an agent with malicious intent (or other common target of anger). And for #2, I've known people who get mad and have an extremely hard time controlling it. Someone or something slights them, it ruins their mood, and then sustains. And they're aware of it the whole time, wishing they weren't mad, because they hate feeling that way. But they're still mad. In comparison, I seem to be lucky. I have gotten genuinely mad before, but exceedingly rarely- maybe a few times in my entire life, and only then mostly in response to years of sustained bad behavior, and only when I was much younger. I wasn't trying to be a paragon of stoicism, I just don't get angry very often by default. Stack a little bit of effort on top of a baseline like that, and it's pretty easy to go beyond merely not acting on anger to smoothing away even the subjective experience of it. Maybe a short and mild response, here and there, but it almost always immediately fades. I strongly doubt I'm the most placid person in the world, so there are probably people out there who are even less angry by default. I bet others have put more effort into controlling their anger, too. It seems likely that "eradication" of anger is within the realm of possible for some. |