During the last month of 2025, many Americans watched the film It’s a Wonderful Life. My own family watches it devotedly every year. We know the plot, the characters, and the life-learning meanings behind its essence. Why do we love it so much? That film always reminds us of the value of our lives, even when our lives are partly ordinary. Yes, it is sentimental, but it brings substantial meaning.
Great books and films have pockets of narrative moments that seem irrelevant but fill the story with small meanings that bring substance to the tale. Each time George is about to ascend a staircase in his old house, he is annoyed by a broken railing finial. His annoyance is a nuisance, then a frustration, and then anger. Surely, he could have glued it, but he never did. The growing aggravation mirrors the frustrations of his life, which is, after all, quite good, but filled with growing anxieties that his lifelong dream to explore the world will not be his. For many of us, there comes a time when life is built on tough consequences. In George’s case, the prospect of prison for alleged embezzlement brings him to a rage. The bell that rings at the beginning and end of the movie has meaning, too, not just for angels to get their wings, but also for the shift from annoyance to anxiety.
We all have micro-stresses that creep into our daily routines—misplacing a phone, being stuck in traffic, spilling coffee on a book, or trying to call a plumber to fix a leak immediately. These are the low-level annoyances that bring us to mumble or sometimes shout a curse word or two to ourselves. Curses are tools to make ourselves feel better, but they don’t solve problems. Although it might soften anxieties slightly, it does not wipe out the effects of health issues when blood pressure rises, hormones take over, and the body’s organs crave normality. In thinking about the phenomenon of micro-stress, I turned to bloggers Shoba Sreenivasan and Linda E. Weinberger, who in 2023 wrote a post, “Small Hassles, Big Stress: Why the Little Things Get to Us,” suggesting that we should be wary of small hassles and negative emotions. They point to studies showing that daily hassles can have a “stronger effect than the impact of major life events.” Even those bothersome issues can prompt stress hormones to disrupt the body system by raising blood pressure, muddying bodily functions, and weakening immunity, to say nothing of a change in mood that could affect social behavior.
When annoyances shift to anger
A few evenings ago, my wife and I had dinner at a neighbor’s house. The meal was lovely, but as the evening continued, the discussion sharply swerved to how the current government is destroying America. I attempted to cool things down and perhaps have some moments when we could rest from politics and enjoy the camaraderie. I interrupted, as I often do, to point out how negative events drag along remnants of positivism, an awkward view these days when the world seems to be falling apart, and America is embroiled in a political divide of not just nastiness and annoyances but pepper-spraying federal agents shooting citizens in broad daylight on city streets. Don’t get me wrong: The killings in Minneapolis raised fears of what is happening to my country; that could cause sleepless nights for anyone. But it is an issue that should be compartmentalized for a portion of the day, not something that should be allowed to create health issues when we obsess about the problem. Some might say, our health be damned, we must be aware and active to bring the country to its senses before it is too late.
Masked federal agents killing American citizens is not an annoyance; it requires anger for the preservation of fundamental human rights. My evening dinner with friends was annoying for me, a person who spends his free time writing a monthly column in The World Financial Review, “Understanding War.” I was okay with the annoyance, but when it shifted to frustration, then anger, and finally to blame for wanting to change the conversation before bedtime, I tried to understand blame, a noun and verb that evokes emotions signaling fault, a word that suggests that there is a fault that is either reciprocal, unjustifiable, or interpretively mistaken. The difficulty is that humans jump to innocence when accused of errors, and they are not ready for acceptance. Blame implies guilt, and the acceptance of guilt is the next phase to be assessed if blame is on fire. Guilt evidence might be vacant, but could be stubbornly denied. Perhaps the acceptance of guilt is stuck in pride.
Life can be wonderful, even with small annoyances, if we can just relax our emotions. George Bailey went through the prospect of prison, a much heavier threat than annoyance, but he learned that he could deal with his troubles by understanding the bigger picture of life and its meaning. In the end, he was gleeful that the old finial was loose. We should all have annoyingly broken finials to remind us how wonderful life can be.