What’s contemporary culture’s most vapid catchphrase? It’s a competitive position with entries from every medium. Television’s a classic source. Almost every sitcom qualifies by giving its most annoying character something to mumble before cutting to a commercial for toxic pills. 24-hour news networks break complex issues down into the most inane sound bites possible. On the other hand, the music industry may deserve the lifetime achievement reward. Generating a new slogan for bored teenagers on a monthly basis is now the only way to sell more than five albums. Mercifully, “you only live once” fell out of fashion when it became a cipher for thinly-veiled suicide attempts. Yet music can’t take all the credit for that one. The rise and fall of that catchphrase was driven by the reigning champion in producing words that mean less than nothing: the internet. But I’ve drifted away from the original question.
“Stop hating” is the most vapid catchphrase under the sun.
If there’s one expression that I’d like to personally slap out of every mouth in this country, it’s every variation of “don’t hate.” Every post-4chan “haters gonna hate” comment makes me wish I could reach through the screen and bitch-smack the thirteen year old mental vegetable on the other end. Histrionic cries of oppression from bloggers with all the self-awareness of balsa wood drove me away from Tumblr within a half an hour. Saying “fuck the haters” in a song is a quick way to convince me that you have the technical skill and lyrical depth of Soulja Boy on morphine.
The current generation is convinced that they’re immune to criticism. I aim to remind them that they’re wrong. About nearly everything.
Don’t blame pop culture for the trend. The language idiots repeat like inbred parrots to express this idea may come from the music industry, but the roots lie elsewhere. I would love to peg this on the mass media. It would mean that my degree has something resembling value. But this quirk of pop culture is a product of national culture. Specifically, the current culture of entitlement. There’s a disturbingly common belief that one is entitled to success, along with the key to the city and Rolls Royce that comes with it. Young egos are shielded from the idea of failure at all costs. The impulse behind this is positive: low self-esteem is like lugging around a psychic anchor. Unfortunately, the fight against it has left us with a wave of adults that takes criticism as a minor form of heresy.
To be fair, you’re a special snowflake. Specifically, special snowflake number 60263499-B in an ongoing blizzard moving across the east coast. Once spring rolls around, you’ll melt into a drop in a pool made of other special snowflakes and flow into the sewer system. Later, you and your trillion roommates will either be dumped into the ocean or vaporized in a water treatment plant.
I may have lain too much of the blame for this upon the functionally retarded. “Stop hating” is only the easily digestible mass version of a universal problem. Educated neurotics are some of the strongest purveyors of this bullshit, albeit in a different form. In some quarters, you run into a phenomenon that can be summarized with “stop oppressing me with reality.” Half of the safe spaces on the internet are zones where anything running against the ongoing circlejerk is drowned out by a tide of bruised egos.
You live on Earth. Unless you move into the dark heart of the Amazon you will encounter criticism and insults. You might even run into outright mockery. If you can’t parry them then you were almost certainly wrong. On the off chance that you weren’t, you were far from worthy of representing your side of the argument.
I’m a proud hater. Positivity is for other people. A cigar is a cigar, and a worthless failure is a worthless failure. I’ll spend the next few months laying that out with exhaustive detail and a grin.