I couldn’t stand her.
I didn’t actually know her. My friends had been sharing her videos about politics and current events. Her opinions weren’t that different from my own. But something about her felt insincere. Smug. Less interested in politics and current events and more in presenting herself. Her shtick felt both irritating and uncomfortably familiar.
I scrolled back through her videos, to ones that had been posted years ago. There was that familiar feeling again: they were all of her singing.
Of course. She was a theater kid.
A performer, a self-promoter, talented – but painfully aware of it. Everybody finds theater kids annoying: their self-seriousness, their loudness, their incessant recitals of Rent. Somewhere, right now, a group of them are systematically ruining someone’s night at Denny’s.
Yet, I felt guilty for being annoyed. Because I’m a theater kid, too. I always have been. I was performing made-up songs and monologues for my friends in preschool. I have a BFA in drama. I’ve considered getting an Our Town-inspired tattoo.
When I saw that girl’s videos, I thought of my most embarrassing self. The constant “too loud/excessive talking” marks on my report cards; the exasperated faces when I finally got the karaoke mic; the constant grandstanding on Twitter in my 20s. Theater kids live at the nexus of painfully sincere and desperately performative.
“You don’t like in other people what you don’t like in yourself,” someone once told me. I wondered if it’s as simple as that.
What is annoyance?
“Annoyance is probably the most widely experienced and least studied of all human emotions,” wrote Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman in their 2010 book, Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us. “There is no Department of Annoying Studies or annoyingologists.” Many psychologists consider it a subset of anger, rather than a pure emotion in itself, and thus harder to study.
“Emotions are sometimes plotted on a chart,” Palca and Lichtman write, “with positive/negative on one axis and arousal/calm on the other.” This method of charting emotions is often called the valence-arousal model. While the extremes are easy to see – such as excitement, a positive feeling with high arousal, or depression, a negative state often with low arousal – where does something less dramatic like annoyance fit in?
MC Flux, a psychologist, neuroscientist and science communicator from the University of Colorado, Boulder, describes annoyance as “moderately negative, and moderate arousal”. Ultimately, he believes, humans want to “maintain homeostasis”, to feel as if they are safe, stable and in control. Emotions, particularly high-arousal ones, often lead to actions that we hope will get us there.
Similarly, annoyance serves a purpose, says Flux: “It’s basically a flag, saying: ‘Something is wrong, and I should probably do something about it.’”
Many annoying things are designed that way. A baby cries because it needs attention. Ambulance sirens need to be loud and obnoxious so people will get out of the way. “The job of an EMS driver … is to overcome everyone’s ability to ignore things,” Palca and Lichtman write.
“A lot of our emotions evolved to push us in the direction of social cohesion,” says Flux.
Yet, while we can pick up a crying baby or pull over when we hear a siren, we can’t do much about other people’s behavior, at least not without causing some social discomfort. Perhaps this is why it stings when we see our annoying qualities in others.
“When you see a little bit of yourself in something,” Flux says, “you recognize it more and you feel like you have more ability to intervene.”
I wish I could tell social media theater kids that not everyone needs to hear their opinions all the time, but I can’t. All I can do is try to remember that myself.
What makes something annoying?
Of course, not all annoying people act like us. Sometimes a behavior is annoying because we don’t understand it.
In Annoying, Palca and Lichtman quote Michael Cunningham, then a communications professor and researcher at the University of Louisville, who describes annoying acts as “social allergens”. These don’t bother us so much at first, but build up over time. He says most fall into one of four categories: uncouth habits, inconsiderate acts, intrusive behaviors and “norm violations”.
The first three categories are all about roughly the same thing: crossed boundaries. Someone’s actions are intruding on our time, personal space or sense of propriety. Yet his final category may be the most important.
“These are intentional behaviors that are not aimed at you personally, but violate some standard that you have,” Cunningham is quoted as saying.
Norms and values dictate our lives, and show us what to expect. These can vary widely, though. In a recent conversation with a friend, I discussed someone I thought was a bit conceited.
“Don’t you hate when people go on and on about all the things they’ve done?” I asked her.
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She disagreed. She figured people like that were just being honest, and taking pride in their accomplishments. I was stunned. Didn’t everyone believe that modesty was the ultimate virtue, like my Irish-Catholic father and raised-in-Minnesota mother had taught me? Apparently not.
There are a million different cultures and viewpoints. Obviously, some will conflict. I could go on any social media app and see something completely against my beliefs: “Women should always be subservient to men,” say, or “The Phantom of the Opera is a great musical.”
“We are a culture that takes annoyance seriously,” says Flux. In the US, we pride ourselves upon rebelling and speaking out. It’s led to some great advances, but fundamentally, we may not be great at picking our battles.
It’s easier to be annoyed about a minor irritant (someone’s showy videos about politics) than it is to be upset about a major issue (the limits of what I can do politically).
“‘If you see something, say something’ – that is the epitome of our culture! We say something about everything,” says Flux. “Annoyance robs us of our energy and our ability to really make a difference … We have to figure out how to re-balance our responses.”
Is it possible to be less annoying – or annoyed?
I know I can be annoying. Sometimes I’ve wondered if it’s possible to have secondhand embarrassment for myself. I also know that I can be easily annoyed.
Pam Shaffer, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles, suggests getting “curious about the other person’s experience”. If someone is doing something that violates our norms or boundaries, there’s almost always a reason for it. Trying to imagine what is driving their behavior can make us feel less annoyed.
While it’s not necessarily a positive emotion, curiosity “can defray a negative emotion”, Shaffer says.
So we shift the question from “Ugh, why would anyone do that?” to “Huh, why would anyone do that?”
“Often the behavior I find most annoying is attached to some deep-seated insecurity,” says Rachel Vorona-Cote, author of Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today. What annoys her is people who lack awareness of their own actions. “It’s uncomfortable to bear witness to people who don’t have any idea of the effect they have on others.”
Monitoring our own behavior, then, and being conscious of what we are insecure about, might make us less likely to irritate others. This can be tricky, though, especially for the many people who struggle to interpret social cues, or for those who live in a culture different from the one they were raised in.
And how much looking inward is too much? The cruel irony is that being obsessed with how one is coming across can make one more annoying. I spent my teens and 20s as the friend who apologized constantly. It was exhausting, both for me and for others.
Flux suggests that it’s not helpful to think about how to be less annoying. “Everyone’s going to find you annoying in some way,” he says. A more important question might be: “How do we learn to better manage things that annoy us?”
“I think sometimes we can take too much of a confrontation-heavy approach to how we interact,” says Flux. Instead, we could try what he calls “prosocial behaviors” – actions that are designed to build connections with others, like teamwork, positive reinforcement or making ourselves useful.
Funnily enough, my old theater kid days provide a good example of how to do that.
At my arts high school, eligible theater students auditioned for every play. If we weren’t cast, we would help build sets, make costumes, run lights and assist the stage manager.
It gave us perspective. We worked with different people, learned why they were the way they were. If we found someone annoying, too bad – we still had to work together. When someone is showing you how to use a miter saw, you have to stop singing Defying Gravity and actually listen, lest you lose a finger.
Rather than focusing on oneself, working together and getting curious are good ways to be less annoying, and less annoyed. Because, as a theater kid might say: “Together, we’re unlimited.”