In 2004, a man named Marvin Heemeyer climbed into a bulldozer he had spent 18 months modifying in secret.
He had reinforced the vehicle with concrete and steel, installed gun ports, and fitted external cameras connected to monitors inside the cab. He was effectively driving a homemade tank.
For the next two hours and seven minutes, he drove through the town of Granby, Colorado causing immeasurable chaos.
First he demolished the town hall. Then the former mayor's home. Then several businesses and offices. But there was a method to Heemeyer's madness. His rampage seemed wild, but it was incredibly specific: The concrete plant's zoning dispute had financially ruined him. The newspaper had painted him as unreasonable. The hardware store's owner had helped to thwart his appeals.
What Heemeyer wanted wasn't wanton destruction, it was meticulously planned vengeance. And he got it.
When it over Heemeyer's makeshift tank finally stalled and he took his own life—people found something unexpected. They found his writings, hours of recordings, and detailed plans. And what emerged wasn't the portrait of a madman. It was the portrait of a man consumed.
For years, Heemeyer had been locked in escalating disputes with neighbours, local businesses, and the town government. Small slights snowballed into feuds, feuds hardened into obsessions, and obsessions calcified into a plan so elaborate it consumed the last year and a half of his life.
The tragedy of Marvin Heemeyer isn't that he was wrong. Some of his grievances were real. It's that his anger became his entire identity. In building his fortress of vengeance, he also built his own tomb.
It's an extreme example. The most extreme. But it illuminates something universal.
Anger makes bad armour, but we keep using it.
It starts with the myth of righteous anger.
We love stories where fury fuels heroism. The wronged protagonist who channels their rage into victory. John Wick loses his dog and decimates the underworld. The Count of Monte Cristo endures imprisonment and emerges to systematically destroy his enemies.
These narratives feel satisfying because they suggest anger is directional—that it strikes outward, hitting only what deserves to be hit.How we respond to adversity isn't determined by the adversity itself, but by the meaning we assign to it.
Two people can experience identical slights but react in dramatically different ways depending on their interpretation.
When we armour ourselves with anger, we believe we're protecting our wounded dignity. But that armour doesn't just keep others out—it locks us in. Like Heemeyer in his reinforced bulldozer, we become isolated within our grievances, unable to see anything but targets for our rage.
The demon on our shoulder whispers that if we channel anger—if we let it drive us—we'll finally get justice. We'll finally be whole. We'll finally feel peace. But anger never delivers what it promises. It's a loan shark offering quick cash at devastating interest.
We face a fundamental choice when wounded: to surrender to reality or to hold onto pain. By "surrender," I don't mean capitulation or defeat. I mean acceptance of what is, rather than exhausting ourselves fighting against what has already happened.
The Stoics understood this. Marcus Aurelius, arguably the most powerful man in the world during his reign, wrote repeatedly about the futility of anger. Not because he never felt it—his Meditations make clear he struggled with it constantly—but because he recognised that anger consumes the vessel that holds it.
Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. It's a cliché because it keeps proving itself true.
The opposite of anger-as-armour isn't passivity. It's clarity.
When we release the need to punish, to prove, to win, we don't become weaker. We become free to actually solve the problem—or to walk away from problems that aren't worth solving.
Heemeyer's neighbours moved on. The town rebuilt. The people he targeted continued their lives. The only person destroyed by Heemeyer's anger was Heemeyer himself.
Most of us will never build a concrete-encased bulldozer. But many of us build emotional versions of exactly that—elaborate internal architectures designed to protect our grievances and deliver our revenge.
The question isn't whether your anger is justified. It might well be. The question is whether it's serving you or consuming you. Whether you're wielding it, or it's driving the bulldozer.
