How to tolerate annoying things

I certainly agree with your take on Buddhism, but I often find that sage advice is buried amongst spiritual waffle in Buddhist books.

I am deaf but not completely deaf. Some sounds I can hear and a lot of the sounds that are loud enough to come to my attention are annoying. Often not the same sounds that annoy other people, too.

I'm reminded of a conversation with my friend who is fully Deaf from birth and a signer. Hearing people are a foreign culture for him. It's tricky to navigate the hearing world sometimes, when you don't know what what noises things make and how they are perceived. (Stacking metal or ceramic dishes is an almost silent experience for me, for example.)

He noted that the sounds hearing people complain about seem related to control. Thunder? Not a problem. Natural and nothing you can do about it. The beep of a truck backing up? That's due to a person. It could be controlled. Rain? Not a problem. Sprinkler system? That's ultimately due to a person. It could be controlled. Microwave beep? Could have been controlled; you're supposed to hit the stop button at 0:01. Dog barking? Annoying because again, supposed to be controlled. Wild birds cawing at the crack of dawn? Filtered out and ignored. (Mostly, some people do complain about those.)

Realizing you don't actually have control and that the other person might not actually have control is surprisingly relaxing, I've found. I suppose that's closely related to the "radical acceptance" of the article.

Not the best example they could have used because the root cause is ambiguous.

I try to be prepared and on-time, but being late some times is unavoidable if there’s a car accident on the freeway that leaves me locked in a traffic, I get a flat tire, my flight is delayed, or any number of other unpredictable things outside of my control happen. I think that’s what the article is trying to talk about.

Probably it's learned behavior from the parents. When your parents had good intentions but really panicked or scolded you like the world was going to end when you did something wrong... that can have a subconscious impact in your life that every wrong move and every thing that happened could be a matter of survival.

I have seen some people turn themselves around with ACT-style therapy like this article introduces. Some can build up response patterns that turn minor daily annoyances into bigger problems that disrupt their mood for hours or even the rest of the day.

These behaviors of blowing things out of proportion or letting them get under your skin can be both learned and unlearned, in addition to developing organically. Therapy techniques like this are an intentional way to practice unlearning bad habits and replacing with undeniably better habits that you want to practice.

Raising and teaching young children is a learning experience for how some of these habits can develop and how to teach better responses to life's frustrations. Kids can get frustrated easily and their emotions run strong. Learning how to teach kids to control their emotions and respond appropriately to life is one of the core parenting challenges. I feel like I learned a lot about myself in the process of trying to figure out how to teach it to my kids and set a good example for them.

On this topic, I've also observed a few cases in teens and adults who seemingly learn bad habits about becoming overly annoyed by small things, primarily from social media influencers. There is an entire universe of social media influencers dedicated to grievance-based entertainment, where they produce content about things that make you angry or feel like the victim. I think it's supposed to be cathartic or helpful, but in the process of producing content they reach further and further for topics to turn into grievances.

The early trend of "emotional labor" being an invisible burden was the first time I saw this. The social media influencer version of emotional labor actually diverged from the literature definition and became an umbrella term meaning that your emotions were unpaid labor. If anyone did something that made you feel those emotions or you had to deal with someone else's emotions, you were supposed to feel burdened and victimized. There have been other trends like "mental load" that are variations of this idea that you have been made into the victim via other people or the world triggering your own emotional responses, which may have become exaggerated via these social influencers constantly bringing them front and center.