People are angry.

More than half of Europeans are stressed. One in four are angry. And it’s about time that businesses and their partners stopped pretending that everything is awesome – because there’s real opportunity in anger, if you get it right. Welcome to Anger Issues.

It has become a bit of a talking point these days that people are “more angry.” Open your (anti) social app of choice and within a few swipes or scrolls you’ll find a rant about the world – or something else – going to shit. “Society has just become loads of cranky toddlers. Everybody’s pissed off all the time”, said Ben Hurst, Director of Facilitation at Beyond Equality in our conversation.

It’s easy to roll your eyes at it, to dismiss it, and scroll on. But we’d be missing out on something incredibly powerful and valuable. Because anger is a changemaker.

There’s an increasing frustration with marketing’s obsession with positivity; that saccharine optimism that our industry often concocts to coat the cracks in people’s lives – and often conveniently ignores the lived reality of many Europeans. In our call, Isabella Kajiwara, a London-based community organiser and writer, lamented: “Today we live in a cult of optimism and positivity. And if you expose the cracks, or disrupt that, people turn on you.” The result is people who are not feelings seen, heard, or recognised. And, ultimately, people who don’t care.

Good angry people

We think it’s worth exposing the cracks and getting as close to them as possible. Not because we think optimism is wrong. But because we think anger is the richer starting point to create ideas that can change the world.

Anger isn’t just one thing, or always a bad thing. It’s arguably more often the result of a violation of something that we truly care about. “We only get angry if something is very dear to us”, explained Lea Dohm, a German psychologist and climate activist. Rob Harrison-Plastow, founder of Source Nine Insights, puts it this way: “Anger is constructed when three conditions converge: something the person cares about is at stake, an identifiable obstruction is in the way, and the person believes they can do something about it.” That element of agency is key to turning anger against an obstacle versus it becoming the obstacle.

We know from research that good anger is healthy. Brief spurts of occasional anger generally have a benign impact on the heart. Anger can be legal performance enhancement. It can help us tackle difficult tasks better. It’s fuel for divergent creative thinking (of which we’ll need more in an age of AI convergence.) And, to an extend, it’s a social connector.

So let’s make some good use of it.

Welcome to Anger Issues

Anger Issues is an invitation to embrace, explore, and cultivate good anger and bring people together who are annoyed with the status quo of the world, their world, their industry. People who are mad about how things are done by organisations, brands, businesses. People who know that they have the ability to change things. Because they lead projects, teams, businesses. Because they are angry about how things are now and have an idea of how things should be tomorrow. It’s an initiative by Uncommon Creative Studio Stockholm, supported by Studio Øutlier.

The state of anger

As part of this project we already spoke to a couple of experts about their view on anger, some of the quotes in this post are from those conversations, and we will be speaking to more. On top of that, we have set out to map real people’s Anger Issues. What drives them mad? What are they angry about? Are they even angry?

To kick this off, we conducted 1,600 online interviews in Germany, France, Sweden and the UK with a nationally representative sample of 18- to 64-years-olds in each country between 13–26 May 2026.

Mixed Feelings

Turns out, people aren’t feeling as angry as one might think. 1 in 4 respondents experienced anger in the last seven days. More than 1 in 2 experienced stress (53%), the dominant emotion in our set of eleven. 4 in 10 felt worried. 1 in 3 felt frustrated.

The picture, however, isn’t only gloom. 42% say they felt joy in the past 7 days. 40% say they felt happiness. 37% felt relaxed.

But.

A groundswell of anger

While only a quarter of respondents say they felt angry, 7 in 10 agree that people seem more angry than they used to. 1 in 2 agree that they themselves feel angry and frustrated more often than they used to. 77% also agree that people seem to get frustrated more easily today. Have we become more sensitive? Does that mean there’s more of a groundswell of anger and frustration? Is it less explicit and more implicit? Have we just become more sensitive? Something to explore in the next few weeks.

Frustrations with businesses

About 1 in 3 respondents had a memorably bad brand or product experience recently. But almost twice as many (6 in 10) feel like brands and businesses are increasingly exploiting normal people. Of those who had a frustrating brand experience, about 50% now feel worse about that brand, 39% feel neutral, and 11% feel better about that brand.

And that’s just the topline.

What to do with all that anger?

Anger isn’t an intuitively comfortable emotional construct like optimism or happiness. But we believe that those who have the courage to embrace their Anger Issues will find incredibly powerful starting points to create impactful work – whatever kind of work that is. Grassroots work with communities. Service and product innovation. Or, of course, any kind of creative work. Brands, products, and work that people in the real world wish existed.

If there’s something that makes you angry or frustrates you, don’t push it aside. Investigate it. Explore it. Lean into it. It might contain the nucleus of the next big thing, the breakthrough that shatters the obstacle that keeps getting in the way.

We’ll be sharing updates about Europe’s Anger Issues over the next few weeks and months. It will be infuriatingly infrequent, but hopefully always valuable and insightful. The next few issues will explore the differences in our data set between the young and the old and how people from different countries have responded. And we will start to share the micro and macro issues that drive Europe mad.

In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you: what makes you angry?

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