I find as I get older that I get tetchy very easily. Often a fairly trivial thing may happen, which gets me overly irritated, cross, complaining. It often happens when I watch TV, especially those documentaries where the presenter seems more interested in projecting themselves than in the subject of the programme. It doesn’t make it any easier for me when, looking over their shoulder at the camera and constantly on the move, they become so enthused by what they are seeing that they leave little room for our own assessment. Why can’t they just sit down, talk, and leave room for our own pleasure?!
Other presenters imagine that they are terribly amusing and have long digressive chats with fellow presenters, their relationship dominating the show. That’s particularly true of local TV when it’s assumed that the viewer is amused when two people argue about each other’s opinions, with nods and winks at the camera. Is there no production control preventing such indulgence? Perhaps all this is a British thing, unknown to our Spanish readers.
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Radio journalists can tread on my tetchiness too, especially when as happens regularly on the BBC’s Today programme, they answer their own questions or rephrase the interviewee’s answers to fit the answer they wished for. Then there’s the celebrity culture we live in, which for me is a cause for major tetchiness, when people of no special consequence become famous merely for jumping through the hoops the media has provided for them. For me this is part of the artificiality of modern life where appearance is more important than substance and ‘virtual reality’ is totally unreal.
I’m not proud of my tetchiness and wonder what causes it and whether it is more a male than a female trait. The beautiful women who are most of our family members exhibit such impatience sometimes, but not to the same degree or frequency as I do.
Could it be that men more easily lack connection with the changing life around them, especially when they are retired and are less secure in their own identity? And less patient.
But I suppose tetchiness is fairly harmless. Anger and despair is another thing and, prompted by the current discovery of parliamentary corruption in this country, there’s plenty of that around at the moment.
Bryan
Pretty insightful post. Never thought that it was this simple after all. I had spent a good deal of my time looking for someone to explain this subject clearly and you’re the only one that ever did that. Kudos to you! Keep it up
Thanks! I'd forgotten this one – sufficiently so to do my latest blog on 'Anger' – three and a half years on, and the next stage to tetchiness perhaps. Hopefully these blogs aren't all about me, but I can't escape the connection between the subject and the experience!
B.
I don't think tetchiness is a male domain. I think we all feel it, whatever age, whatever sex, if we're tired, bored or just in critical mode. I think its circumstancial rather than age- or male-related.
I agree about the generality but reserve the possibility that age and gender may aggravate what otherwise is true of all of us.Thanks for your comment.
B
I completely agree with the above comment, the internet is with a doubt growing into the most important medium of communication across the globe and its due to sites like this that ideas are spreading so quickly.