I am a hater to my core.
Being a hater is what gets me through the day. I was born to be a hater. Nothing brings me more joy. Everyone has a calling, and mine is being a hater. I’m a hater and I’m proud.
I don’t agree with a single sentence I just typed. But they’re all things that members of my generation have posted on TikTok. These phrases plague my “For You” page and have made their way into my conversations in person. From embracing our judgemental tendencies to using comment features to rip each other apart, being a hater has become a crucial element of Gen Z culture. We’re all human; we all bring our own set of flaws to the table, and self-awareness is the first step to becoming a better version of oneself. But Gen Z doesn’t seem all too concerned with self-betterment — our generation seems to take pride in our ability to tear one another down.
In an ever-expanding, constantly changing sea of digital media, it’s getting harder and harder to stand out and get the 15 seconds of fame so many desire. In an attempt to set ourselves apart from the crowd, Gen Z becomes increasingly extreme with each passing day. While this may have begun with a few videos openly embracing the “hater” lifestyle, these videos quickly became trends. But as people become more and more open about their pessimistic and judgmental tendencies, they work against their original intentions of standing out. You can scream into the TikTok void all you want, but when your voice dies down, so does the ephemeral attention you might have received in those 15 seconds of fame.
Almost 25 years after the turn of the millennium, we’re seeing an undeniable revival of 2000s trends. Low-rise jeans, another “Mean Girls” movie and the glamorization of the judgmental attitudes upheld during this decade. My “For You” page is jam-packed with videos of people embracing judgment and edits of fictional 2000s bullies, many with captions and comments that these people are “so real.” I’m all for bringing back cargo pants, but glorifying the toxic and judgmental culture that fostered a dangerous eating disorder epidemic isn’t a trend I can get behind.
There are a few life lessons you learn as a child that feel stupid and simplistic until you finally wrap your head around them during adolescence. Be yourself because everyone else is taken. Actions speak louder than words. And, most notably, bullies act the way they do because they’re insecure. If there’s anything social media is good for, it’s a quick fix of validation — a shallow source of dopamine to conceal the reason you long for that validation in the first place. A virtual Band-Aid over an emotional bullet hole. Gen Z has become a group not unlike the seagulls from Pixar’s “Finding Nemo” — mindlessly echoing ideas in a desperate attempt to be part of a community, even if the community is people who actively seek ways to tear others down.
I’ve seen “toxic positivity” up close and personal — I know what it looks like, and I can’t stand it. Negativity is a natural part of life and it isn’t possible to have positive experiences without it. It’s easy to love someone on their best days. But love truly proves itself during the negative moments — the moments where it has something to overcome. This is all to say that I can appreciate the significance and inevitability of negativity, but creating negativity out of thin air — especially to make another person’s life worse — is nothing to be proud of, and certainly nothing to aspire to.
I have often said that I believe people are innately good. For this, people have talked down to me as though I am naive, or as though I am lying to appear more naive than I am. I have been told we only do good things for the rewarding feeling afterward. But why is our natural reaction to feel good about ourselves after we’ve done something good? And why is our natural reaction to feel guilty when we know we’ve done something wrong? It’s almost as though our bodies know something that our brains do not. I don’t believe that “hating” comes naturally to humans. And if it does, it should be reserved for people who have unforgivably harmed us or our loved ones. But the person who bumped into you on the street or wore an unattractive outfit on their latest Instagram post doesn’t deserve your hate. I know this phrase is often used in a hyperbolic manner but, like it or not, language has power. Using words this extreme in situations so minuscule can’t lead to anything good in the long run, especially during our slow but steady return to the toxic culture of the 2000s.
In an age where we use TikTok as if it were Google, constantly searching for others’ opinions, scrolling through videos to see what they think and browsing the comments to see what other people think about what they think, it’s nearly impossible to know what to think at all. But using the internet to gain temporary validation is a dangerous game — especially when it leads to the invention and perpetuation of hatred. And for what? Fifteen seconds of attention as you scream into the TikTok void? It’s not 2004 anymore. It’s time some of us grow up.
So maybe I am a hater — a hater of haters. To my core.
TV Beat Editor Olivia Tarling can be reached at tarling@umich.edu.