Is Anger Your Armour?: Why safety and growth pull in opposite directions

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 was over—when Heemeyer's makeshift tank finally stalled and he took his own life—people found a note in his workshop:
"I was always willing to be reasonable until I had to be unreasonable. Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things." — Marvin Heemeyer
What a quote. The internet celebrated it at the time, and he became a cult hero of sorts. The lone man raging against the machine of bureaucracy, who took his fate into his own hands.
All of this over a zoning dispute. Years of smouldering resentment the conviction that he had been wronged and deserved retribution.
We have a strange relationship with anger as a culture. In our stories, we celebrate it. We cheer as John Wick slaughters his way through the criminal underworld to avenge his dog. We feel satisfaction when the Count of Monte Cristo meticulously destroys those who betrayed him. Our highest-grossing films often feature protagonists turning their pain into righteous fury.
But reality is less glamorous. The actual man in the actual armoured bulldozer didn't ride off into the sunset. He died alone in a cloud of concrete dust and engine smoke, having destroyed property but resolved nothing.
In real life there isn't a clean three-act structure with a cathartic finale. In real life, anger rarely delivers the resolution we crave. Instead, it traps us in what Alfred Adler called a cycle of perceived inferiority and compensatory aggression.
Adler was the founder of individual psychology, and he taught something profound:
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 immutable facts. I mean recognising that while we cannot always control what happens to us, we can choose our response.
Holding onto pain can feel like power. It gives us purpose, direction, a clear enemy. But that sense of power is an illusion. True power lies in the ability to let go - to refuse to be defined by what has wounded us.
The person most damaged by your unresolved anger is you. Your life is too valuable to sacrifice at the altar of retribution.
Viktor Frankl, who survived Nazi concentration camps, wrote:
"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response." — Viktor E. Frankl
Even in the most extreme injustice we retain the freedom to determine what meaning we assign to our suffering.
The armoured bulldozer might feel safe, but it's a prison of our own making. Inside, the view is limited to what we can see through the narrow slits we've left open: targets, threats, conspiracies against us. Outside is a world of possibilities we can no longer access.
The armour we build against pain ultimately becomes a coffin. The easy question to ask is whether your anger is justified. The hard question to ask is whether your anger is serving you, or if you have begun to serve it.