The things that make you really angry as you age

Anger is in the news again. It’s on the up of course (there were 40 per cent more incidents of road rage in 2022 than in the previous year) and it’s officially a killer. Even thinking about something that made you angry years ago increases your chances of having a heart attack or stroke.

There are lots of reasons for the anger - from unresolved childhood issues to potholes - but anger is also, as far as I can see, age related. Quite different things make you angry in your fifties to the ones that made you boil in your thirties although some anger triggers will stay the same. Here are a few currently in the 50-plus chart.

Going down: lateness. Going up: lack of engagement

A while back, when the YAs were an hour late for Sunday lunch, I felt a bit angry (more than a bit if the lamb was ruined) but now I think of them slogging through traffic on their bikes in the rain and I’m grateful they’ve bothered. Their excuses – we had a late night – seem reasonable. However, if any of them were to then get out their phone and start scrolling while the Old Adults gamely try to find out how their lives are going … that’s anger-making.

Going down: one upmanship. Going up: first-world moaning

Your competitive friends will drive you nuts when you’re in your forties and struggling a bit, with their unnecessary bathroom renovations and their children who order lobster when you go on holiday. Then all of a sudden you don’t care and you accept that’s them and we’re all different. What you find maddening, instead, is people’s ability to moan about things that are, from a normal perspective, everyday things arising from affluence. The trouble with the house in Italy. The fact that Ocado can’t find their second home down the dingy lane. The worry about where in the garden to put the marquee for the wedding. You want to say, “anyway about my sepsis scare”… but you’re too busy feeling angry.

Going down: domestic chaos. Going up: environmental vandalism

A while ago what made me angry were wine stains and pan-singed worktops, drinks upended on rugs, bin-juice trailed upstairs (too lazy to unlock the back door). Now I realise you can fix that stuff and I’m keeping my rage for the bigger acts of destruction. Last week I surprised myself when my neighbour’s builder uprooted a 20-year-old honeysuckle that had been interrupting the clean lines of the boundary wall. Shouty angry I was. Hands on hips bellowing.

Going down: mansplaining. Going up: elderlysplaining

You can call out mansplaining at our age, but elderlysplaining arrives in the guise of a caring person who only means well. My dad, who was born in 1927, was an enthusiastic smart phone operator, online shopper, fan of Normal People and Alexander McQueen (who he first read about in this paper), yet regularly found himself subjected to the patronising hand-on-wrist explanations of people with no business explaining anything to anyone – simply because he was in his nineties. It didn’t make him angry, of course, just amused (mid-Eighties there’s another shift, apparently).

Old anger triggers that are still going strong:

• Anything to do with moving the charger, or - meltdown territory - removing the charger from the building. This is still full zero-to-10 in a second territory. I can feel my heart going just thinking about it.

• Not answering urgent text messages (although said messages have been read).

• People taking showers that last 15 minutes. It feels aggressive.

• People disputing what you’re saying and referring to Google for corroboration more than once in one evening.

• Gen Zers assuming they are the keepers of the truth and refusing to discuss certain subjects in your presence because you cannot be trusted to debate them.

• One thing that doesn’t make you angry any more is getting lost because you never do thanks to the satnav. So that’s progress.