The elderly will probably tell you that the world has always been the same and that what we are currently living already occurred in the past. Nonetheless, no matter how old you are, the same observation is drawn by many people: your friends, your family, your professional circle, the media and even some people you just meet for the first time will tell you they have the feeling that our society is getting more and more aggressive, sometimes (often?) for practically nothing.

Violence can be verbal or physical and we unfortunately witness it too often in our daily lives: someone who calls his bank and turns out to be offensive with his financial adviser because his credit card was blocked; a car driver who honks and screams at the car before him because it does not move on quickly enough; people who confront each other for a simple seat in a bar or a restaurant; neighbors who become threatening because they are fed up with each other’s noises. The list could be even longer and you may find some situations you personally witnessed (or lived).

The point is not to stigmatize certain people and say they should calm down. Of course, some people should calm down, life is not about yelling and acting tough all day long. The thing is, why did we become so aggressive and how to tackle it? Why do we observe simple and daily situations turn into nonsense acts of violence? Life is hard and we do have full of reasons to freak out, but we should recognize that if we all do so, the world will blow out.

We have to communicate and act smartly even though we are pissed off or disturbed by something. We have to remain role models for our children. We have to admit that we can mess up sometimes and that the other guy in front of us is maybe right. You will not get thunderstruck because you say you are wrong.

This is easy to write, harder to enforce, but we should all say no to aggressiveness on our local scale. There is enough in this world to worry about.