Tagged: hatred
It Is So Easy To Hate People
Internet Explorer Girl’s face???/Different personalities, yo.
They’re just a speckle among the sea of people you know, the rest of which you feel passionate, neutral, ambivalent, or just plain indifferent about.
They’re not aware that you “hate” them, so they don’t try to defend themselves.
That, or they’re 100% aware and have reciprocated the hatred.
But in any case, I don’t think we should hate people anymore.
Hi. I’m Catherine, and I’m an extreme categorizer.
If you ask me about a person, I have a tendency to immediately blurt out whether or not I love them or hate them. Very rarely am I able to distinguish them as someone in between.
But I’ve given it a lot of thought (as well as love and reflection) and I’ve come to conclude that it’s not healthy to categorize people into extremes. You can’t 100% love or hate someone.
I used to categorize everyone I knew. Lately, I’ve made a huge effort to no longer categorize people, and to recognize them as what they are: human. Like me. Human.
It’s more detrimental to arbitrarily hate someone.
You think you hate them, but you probably don’t.
See, we are each our own person. The only things we know are what we see and what we hear. Both are never 100% accurate; both are obscured by our own predispositions and personal biases. Who are we to assume that we know everything about the people we supposedly hate? We have absolutely no stable foundation to base our hatred off of.
I am not an angel, you are not the devil. We are a combination of both. I would even go as far to say that I am not more angel than devil, and you are not more devil than angel. We’re probably equal in our angelic/devilish proportions, but we just evaluate these sorts of measurements in different ways. You shouldn’t hate someone for “sinning” differently than you.
Maybe you think you hate them because you two are just so different. You have completely different morals, backgrounds, opinions, perspectives, goals, and methods of achieving these goals. None of these disparities constitutes as a character flaw. They are character differences, and there’s nothing you can do about them. So, what to do at this point? Sometimes, opposites attract and live in harmony. Otherwise, it takes a bit of experimenting and suffering to realize that two personalities really don’t mix well. In the saddest of situations, people never realize that they are just suited to be companions, and lead unhappy relationships.
But what makes one lifestyle superior to another? Aren’t any reasons that you try to give completely arbitrary?
I also think part of the problem has to do with the media. Yes, we are constantly criticizing the media for destroying the beneficial aspects of human nature and yet, this has become somewhat of a blanket indict. The media is not totally evil. In this instance however, the media helps to spread these ideas that if two people have conflicts, someone is wrong and someone is right. The best example I can provide would be these things I see on Tumblr all day, everyday.
They’re always like:
“The biggest mistake I have made in my life is letting people stay in my life far longer than they deserve.”
Well, they’re inspiring, are they not? They’re effective, aren’t they? If taken seriously, they manage to keep one person from engaging in a conflict of some sort and “being the better person” or “being more mature” or “letting it go”. But these messages are also somewhat misleading. Don’t they make it seem like whoever reads these positive messages is the victim of some horrible bullying, and that the “bully” is wrong, insecure, misguided, etc. Of course, these messages are true – to an extent. There are definitely people out there that don’t treat others well, More often than not, this is really not the case; the real root of the problem arises from personality differences. And again, there’s nothing you can do about them.
Shoulda Woulda Coulda Gotten Mad
I should get mad more often. I should blow up in public and scream at people and throw coffee and break vases. At the very least, I should confront my problems a little bit more…and yet I don’t.
Some people deal with their anger through holding grudges. They’re passive aggressive towards people who anger them; they don’t say anything about what they’re upset about, but it’s clear that something is wrong from their behavior.
Others are very outspoken. They say whatever is on their mind, often without considering the negative repercussions; the feelings they might hurt, the confidences they might dent.
I deal with my resentment in a deleterious way.
First, I don’t. I tend to not confront people that I’m upset with. But I’m never passive aggressive; I only take my feelings and shove them into the corner of my soul, and I act as though nothing is wrong, and that nothing has changed. And so many conflicts never get addressed, and one of two things will start to happen.
Either my frustration will grow at an exponential rate, or I’ll think rationally about the situation and decide that my irritation has no foundation, no rational reasoning. In the first situation, I’ll become continually upset to the point of no return, and a relationship might be in trouble. Technically, nothing happens, but something always ends up happening, indirectly. My somewhat hostile (yet not totally obvious) behavior might come off as alienating, and someone might get mad at me.
In the second example, I’ll prematurely say things that I don’t mean. But then I’ll think about the whole situation. I’ll put things in context and I’ll put things in perspective and might just decide that I was having a bad day. There are always people who are fighting battles that I know nothing about, that provide a condonable excuse for their behavior. And thus, I’ll forgive and forget. Or rather, I’ll forgive (to an extent) but I won’t forget. And these sentiments might just build up on each other and the whole process starts again, to the point that the whole relationship ends up like the first scenario.
So in the long run, this is a bad habit. I should get mad more often. I would, but I just don’t know how to properly approach these sort of situations. I could try it, but I’m not at the point where I’m comfortable taking these sort of risks. If there’s a possibility of reconciliation, I’ll try to suppress my erratic (and often irrational) feelings.
I think I should venture out of my comfort zone. Get mad at people more often, ya know? I might finally blow up at people for things that I’ve never forgiven and finally get over it. Who knows…steaming could be healthy.
Catherine Zhang 