5 Reasons to Stop Hating Other People

Not that people aren’t annoying (because they are), but because it’s just a waste of your time.

Jesse
7 min readNov 20, 2023

“Hell is other people.” -Jean-Paul Sartre

Most people can name at least one person on Earth that has annoyed them. Maybe it was a stranger who littered right in front of you. Maybe it was a bunch of loud drunk teenagers on the subway. Maybe you subconsciously see a woman in heels, fully done up with a face of makeup and styled hair and carrying a designer bag, and label her as shallow. Maybe you’ve rolled your eyes to yourself while listening to some guy at a bar mansplaining stocks and investments to his girlfriend. It could even be some social media influencer who is racist and sexist and spends all day posting about their racist and sexist views. It doesn’t really matter.

I won’t deny you your right to dislike who you want to dislike; all of us have our values and beliefs and find it difficult to respect people who don’t abide by them. By “hate” I mean when you actively loathe someone. And if you’re someone who is able to like everyone they meet, then good job, you don’t need to read this article.

However, for the rest of us, hating other people (for whatever reasons) can take up a lot of our time and energy. Obviously this varies from person to person, so I’m writing this for my fellow cynics out there, who spend an unfortunate portion of their life disliking the rest of the world. (Maybe I’m just writing this for myself, actually.) So, without further ado…

A perspective shot of crossing a busy street in a city.
Do you think you could be friends with everyone in this picture? Maybe if I really tried… (Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash)

5 Reasons to Stop Hating Other People

1. People are inherently and inevitably imperfect.

As much as I hate to say it, all of us are kind of dumb sometimes, are short-sighted and biased, are emotional and irrational, are contradictory and hypocritical. I’ve never met a person who wasn’t imperfect in some way, and no matter how well-educated you are, how self-disciplined you are, how famous or rich or are, you can’t help being human.

Being human means that we judge by appearances, because it’s the first thing we see. Being human means we like eating unhealthy food, we like attention, we like staying in bed all day on our phones, or entertaining ourselves on YouTube and Netflix or getting caught up in celebrity drama.

If you hate lazy people, realize that it’s human nature to be lazy. If you hate shallow people, realize that all of us understand certain things about the world in a superficial way. If you hate people who are smart-asses or arrogant, realize that every person likes to feel seen or important. If you hate people who think that Panda Express is authentic Chinese food, think of a country in the world whose cuisine you know nothing about, and realize we all have gaps in our knowledge, and no one has the time to learn everything about everything.

Most people are the way they are because it’s human nature. If you hate humans for being human, you might as well hate dogs for being dogs, hate the weather for being the weather, and anything else that is inherent and inevitable. Most of the time, it’s a lot easier to accept that this is just the way we are.

A city skyline at night with vibrant lights.
We can acknowledge that humans are ruining the environment because we leave our lights on all the time, and not hate humanity for it. (Photo by Max Bender on Unsplash)

2. No one wants to be constantly judged for everything they do.

Could you imagine walking into a room and having a group of people pick apart the outfit you randomly chose that morning, and make you feel terrible about everything you’re wearing? Or deciding one day to buy a nice jacket or car or bottle of wine to treat yourself, and hearing somebody call you a snob or rich trash? Or liking a TV show just to read comment that says anybody who enjoys that show is an idiot?

A generous percent of the time, the choices we make about what we wear, what we eat, what we watch on TV or say or do in the presence of other people are absent-minded and not meant to reflect us as a person. You could argue that someone who acts cocky or like a douchebag is doing it on purpose, but you don’t know what their thought process is behind those words. Maybe they’re insecure, maybe they’ve just been like that all their life and know no alternative, heck, maybe their friend dared them to and it’s just an act.

My point is that we tend to assume people have clear intentions behind everything they say and do, and therefore can create an image of their character based on things we perceive. But most of the time, people just do things that make them happy, or that they feel is comfortable or acceptable, and don’t think much of them.

Personally, I don’t think about what I wear out of the house, I don’t think about half of the things I say before I say them, and a lot of my opinions are just random and bound to change at any moment. I think both you and I can agree we’d rather be left alone and have people not take those things too seriously. If somebody decided to hate me because of those things I just listed, they’re playing themselves. It’s all so inconsequential that the “me” they hate might as well just be an imaginary person they created that doesn’t even exist.

A clothes rack with shirts hanging on it.
If someone hates my shirt, does that give them the right to hate me, too? Even if I just wore it cuz nothing else was clean? (Photo by piotr szulawski on Unsplash)

3. Other people’s life choices don’t affect you until you decide that they do.

Obviously I don’t mean that someone punching you in the face “only hurts if you decide it does” or something like that; it’s definitely possible for other people to do things that make your life worse. I just mean that when people make life choices that bother you, the majority of the time your life isn’t actually affected in any way.

Let’s say someone is deciding to become a professor, and you hate professors (just pretend). You think that they don’t contribute to the world and just spend all their time talking fancy so people think they’re smart, that they perceive themselves as superior just because they stayed in school for like 10 years extra, whatever.

If you never met that person, you wouldn’t be able to hate them, and your life would have had almost no negative impact from their decision to work at a university. So, in the same way, you can dislike university professors but still not feel aggravated when your friend says they want to get a PhD. It doesn’t have anything to do with you, and other people can live their lives how they want. So just don’t mind it.

An empty lecture hall.
Maybe someone has trauma from places like this and now hates all university students and staff. (Photo by Changbok Ko on Unsplash)

4. You will never run out of people to hate.

I promise that you if you actively look for a person to hate, you’ll always be able to find someone. Always. The world has so many people that you may as well have infinite options. That also means for the rest of your life, you’ll probably run into people that you find annoying for one reason or another.

If you really wanted to, you could track down every person in the world who likes the colour blue (it would take you multiple lifetimes, though) and tell them you hate them, but that wouldn’t benefit you in any way. So then you could just think, I’ll hate everyone I meet who likes blue. But you could also just decide to only hate half of them, or only hate them occasionally, or not hate them at all. If the spectrum goes from zero to infinity, then every step of that spectrum of hating people is sort of arbitrary and meaningless. Maybe the right answer is to just stick at 0.

Stadium bleachers full of people.
Could you imagine trying to hate every person in this stadium? Exhausting. (Photo by Anna Sullivan on Unsplash)

5. Hatred is time and energy-consuming, and gets you nowhere.

And that leads into my last point, which I’ve already pretty much stated. Hating is unproductive. It’s a waste of time and a waste of energy because nobody has ever gained anything by being hated or hating others.

Every minute of your life you spend hating someone is a minute you’ve decided to make yourself unhappy, instead of doing something else like watching a funny movie or eating a yummy cinnamon roll or going outside to enjoy the weather. Even if you hate someone who’s done something horribly wrong to you, like killed your mother or something, hating them doesn’t solve anyone’s problem. (I’m not saying you’re not allowed to, you just don’t gain anything.)

Even if none of the other points connected with you, I could argue that this is a good reason for most of us to stop getting irritated at other people. Whether it’s video game players or social media influencers we meet online that we hate, or an annoying coworker, or your own siblings, it’s universal that good things rarely come out of loathing people. Most of the time, it just makes your own life worse.

If you’d consider dropping a clap or a follow, it’s free and you can always change your mind. Thanks for reading!

Membership

Read member-only stories

Support writers you read most

Earn money for your writing

Listen to audio narrations

Read offline with the Medium app

--

--

Jesse
Jesse

Written by Jesse

University student who likes to write about their random thoughts :)

Responses (1)

What are your thoughts?