Hate is a term which, in this culture at least, is considerably overused. On a daily basis, you can hear it used in contexts like “I hate how they put ads before youtube videos now! Stupid youtube, how dare it waste 15 seconds of my time before letting me waste 5 minutes of my time!” or, “[jokingly] I hate you, what did you do that for?” all the way to “OH MY DEAR SWEET JESUS LORD AND SAVIOR, I FREAKING HATE JEWS!!! THEY SHOULD ALL BE SWALLOWED UP BY A HOLE IN THE GROUND AND CONSUMED BY SATAN IN THE FORM OF A TASTY BREAKFAST CEREAL!!!!!” I hope Satan uses milk. But anyway, you get the point. In the first two, the word “hate” is obviously kind of misused. I mean, think what hate means. When you hate something, you despise it with every fiber of your being, you have no positive thoughts for it, you would like nothing more than to see it destroyed. Now come on, do you really hate those people who cut you off in traffic, or that one person who accurately told you that strapless dress you got at the thrift store doesn’t go so well with your hairy armpits and man-boobs? No, you probably don’t, so stop saying that you do!
I mean the real problem here is that the word has now lost all meaning. If you say that you hate your damn cat, when he barely does anything at all, and does even less worthy of hating him for; if you then say that you hate Hitler, it’s just not going to have any kind of effect. Sure, with Hitler, I suppose, one could have a reasonably good idea of how much you like him, regardless of your reputation with using the word “hate”, but what if you’re talking about hating something less obvious? What if you really hate your next door neighbor, or a social rival? If you keep complaining about hating things, then you have to go to much more trouble to convey your feelings for a person. This isn’t too huge of an issue, but wouldn’t it just be easier to be able to say “hate”, and people would understand the severity of your opinion, rather than having to say things like “utterly despise,” “loathe beyond all measure,” and “hold in the highest of contempt,” just to get a single point across? In fact, in the likely event that you need to use all of these in a single conversation to properly express yourself, you’ll probably end up overshooting it and looking like some deranged, neurotic lunatic with homicidal tendencies, rather than just someone with a strong opinion.
So, in short, you need to stop using the word hate unless you really mean it. I know this won’t happen, and that you’ll all just keep on overusing it to the point that you say it more than teenagers use “like” in a sentence, but I feel like I have to try to persuade you. In fact, sometimes these essays seem utterly futile, in that I am trying to pull the heads of millions of human beings out of their own asses. With one person this is hard enough, but it is pretty much impossible for me to persuade an actually significant amount of people to stop what they’re doing, no matter how much they masochistically enjoy it, and start doing things that are actually progressive. No one man has enough leverage and tact to incite such a huge change in an entire race, no matter how stupid the problem he faces. This is because, no matter how stupid something is, if people have already decided on doing it en masse, there’s just no stopping them easily.
Aha! This is the part where you were thinking to yourself “Oh, looks like this lune has finally stopped talking, that was short. Well, I might as well get back to Minecraft and gay porn.” But you’re not getting off that easy! I have just one more point to make about hatred, which I think I can drag out for at least another few paragraphs! (And now you’re thinking “Oh shit, he’s not done yet, and I’ve already gotten my lotion out.”)
Probably the most important thing about hatred is that it is actually bad for you. Hatred is, perhaps, more harmful to your mind and psyche than any disease or drug could ever be to your body. The thing about it is that it only causes pain to hold on to it. If someone slaps you, you can be angry at them for a while. But think of my definition of hatred above. Whether you call it hatred or not isn’t really important at all, what’s important to your health is whether you do it. And if you do, truly hate something or someone, for something as trivial as slapping you, then… Well, I’m sure that you can all see the problem with doing that.
Another thing to worry about is holding on to hatred. As the Buddha once said, “Holding onto hatred and anger is like holding a hot coal, with the intent of throwing it at someone. In the end, it is only you who gets burned.” This is exactly the case with hatred. Whether you hate someone has no effect on them whatsoever, especially if they don’t seek your approval. But it does have an effect on you. Think, again, of my definition for hatred. Think of all of the negative emotion and intense rage and resentment caused by hatred. That must take a lot of energy to maintain, yes? Hating someone is emotionally draining, when you think about it. It simply takes out of you to put so much energy into hating, as it would if you put as much energy into mourning a loss, or into fearing something. So that’s one consequence of hating, it exhausts you mentally.
The second consequence of hatred on your mind is what it does to it. Hatred can change a person drastically, and even if it doesn’t it can change what is thought of him. Truly hating something, like I said, is very intense and very powerful. As a consequence, it has effects on a person who hates. It can make someone angry, or bitter or spiteful. It can even blind someone from their better judgment, and drive them to do, think, or say things that they wouldn’t ordinarily. If someone holds on to hatred for long enough, this kind of thing becomes permanent. A hateful person, like I described above, is seldom thought fondly of by others, and the odds are that no one is going to really like someone who is generally hateful. Like a lot of traits, hatefulness can be permanent or temporary, but it is never good. It can harm or offend those around you, and change your mind forever.
You may think right now, that being a hateful person isn’t so bad. You may think that having your mind changed to be hateful is just another personality. Let me say one more thing about what hatred does to you. Hatred hurts you. As was said with the coal metaphor, hatred can cause you more anguish than the thing that you hate could ever hope to. You may think that being bitter, or angry, or contemptuous is only harmful to others, and it is very easy to do so, as I’ll go into later. But hatred never feels good to possess. Hatred never gives someone a happy feeling. It leads to bitterness; it leads to anger, to frustration, even to despair. Hatred will never lead someone to feel happy or whole, the will always feel negative while they are hateful of something. (Provided they’re thinking of that something, if they’re just hateful in general then they’re obviously not feeling negative for every second of their lives.)
Possibly the worst part of hatred, though, is how easy it is to hate, sometimes without even realizing. Hatred is never caused by oneself. No one ever finds himself feeling hateful just when he’s thinking of himself, it’s always someone or something else that someone hates. It has to be any object, because unlike happiness and sadness, hatred cannot simply be a spontaneous mood without some kind of subject. And when someone feels hatred, they don’t think about feeling it. They just think of what the hatred is directed at, and how horrible it is. Part of hatred is seeing something as worse than it is. So it’s easy to think that the subject of one’s hatred is entirely to blame, and that you only perceive something as it is, rather than experiencing an emotion which is skewing your perception for it, and causing you to feel the way you do. This is exactly how hatred is allowed to continue, it is because people identify it as entirely someone else’s fault that they possess their hatred, or even they don’t realize that they hate something at all.
From this stage, hatred becomes a parasite. It leeches out your happiness, it takes away from your enjoyment of life, and it leaves you feeling bad (bad is fairly general, but it can cause a whole load of negative emotions.) It even fools you into believing that the source of your problems is someone else. The truth of the matter is, though, that while someone else may or may not be making you feel the way you do, the true source of the problem is you. It is only by letting go of your hatred that you can begin to heal and feel better, even though it seems easier and more reasonable to hang onto it; it will simply do you no good. There are, of course, exceptions to this, like when someone is physically or verbally abusing you; but even then, justified or not, it's simply better for you not to hate them. I suppose it is only the pointless hatred, hatred that you have for something which no longer affects you, that letting go of can make one feel completely better.
There are very, very few instances where it is actually helpful to hate anything. Even in those examples, it is no good to you or anyone if you continue to hate something forever. To the human race, hatred is more of a disease than anything else. What people need to do is this: Firstly, to learn to recognize when they hate something. Like I said, sometimes hatred doesn’t feel like hatred, or an emotion at all. However, if you hate something, it is always possible to realize that you do. It does take some difficult self-evaluation, at times, but it is vital that you learn to identify any hatred you possess. Secondly, we need to get rid of hatred. No matter how hard this is, no matter how justified someone is in hating something, it just needs to stop. HAtred can only cause harm, it can only destroy things; and it has destroyed things, at innumerable times in history. The only thing hating or not hating something really changes, is you, and the latter option is certainly better. You can even have the same opinions about something without hating it, and be far healthier for it. Finally, if you must hate, then sometimes it simply can’t be helped, so try to overcome your hatred, but don’t beat yourself up about it if you can't. And finally, whenever you don't hate something… PLEASE DON’T SAY THAT YOU FREAKING HATE IT!!!
The Ellipsis
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