What the rise of the Rage Room says about modern life

APPARENTLY, Rage Rooms are all the rage. Allegedly, they’re a healthy way for us to “deal with” our anger. They kicked off in Canada a few years back, stomped their way through the USA and, with the opening of the UK’s first dedicated Rage Room in Birmingham city centre last week, they’re about to start throwing their weight around over here.

Rage Rooms are marketed as a space to express and process pent-up anger in a “fun” way by destroying small, medium or large objects in a safe place, with a safe weapon (such as a plastic baseball bat). Typical “search and destroy” fayre includes anything and everything smashable, from old crockery and computers to shop mannequins and old alarm clocks.

For that really meaningful, customised rage experience, you can take along your very own obscure objects for destruction (such as that quirky, three-legged coffee table your ex made at evening classes; or that monolith of a Jacuzzi-cum-foot spa that you hoped would open up a whole new world of oneness and sensuality but which you keep stubbing your toe on when you get up for your third pee of the night).

IF you don’t fancy the hassle of taking along your own items for a tailor-made Armageddon, you can purchase extra consumable destructibles in-store in the foyer when you get there. Prices for the overall event range from £20 per half hour for the Basic Rage experience (includes five small objects and one medium object for total destruction with a weapon of your choice – provided it’s not a gun); or, for that really heavy duty, industrial level, built-upover-a-lifetime kind of embedded rage, you can opt for the £45 Deluxe Rage experience (which includes bigger items such as an old printer for more bespoke dismembering). Your very own Incredible Hulk catharsis is only an electronic booking form away. Low-hanging fruit in the form of safe, organised aggression and mocked-up violence. Less within our grasp though – and much more challenging than smashing a defenceless 1970s dinner plate that never caused anyone any harm – are the reasons for our rage. Who are we really angry with? Were we born angry? And even if we get to find out, what then? Is rage recyclable into something more constructive and environmentally friendly?

These are complex questions about the nature of our very human nature and about how we relate to others.

It seems to me that the act of entering a Rage Room for 30 minutes in order to somehow, magically, dispatch and transform our anger by whacking stuff, is about as effective as scratching eczema: there’s momentary gratification but it makes the symptoms worse and also fails to treat the underlying cause.

Pumping up our anger to the level of full-blown destructive aggression offers us little insight into why we feel angry, or mitigates the heavy toll rage can exact on body and mind.

ANGER is often a defence against sadness, vulnerability and fear of rejection. When we lived in caves and fought the good fight with woolly mammoths, we needed to get aggressive to survive. A case of he who roars loudest, lasts longer.

We have evolved considerably since then and our anger is now much more likely to be generated by feeling undervalued and underachieved, by abusive treatment as a child, by living with the consequences of bad decisions made decades ago, or being chained to a desk for 10 hours a day in a call centre, only to trudge along concrete highways and pavements at the end of a shift to the asylum of our modern-day caves.

The world we live in now offers a plethora of antagonists for our rage.

All you have to do is walk to the bus stop or stand beside someone on the underground who thinks its perfectly fine to cough all over you.

While we can’t control how others behave towards us, we can think about and shape our responses to their behaviour.

If we allow ourselves to dive mindlessly into a cauldron of reactive rage, we overheat and sink.

Better and smarter to tread water, take a walk around the block, take some deep breaths and ask yourself: what am I really angry about? How do I change things? A dialogue with ourselves is worth 1,000 smashed dinner plates.