Hate Consumption

The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly

The Four Horseman of my personal hate consumption apocalypse

“I’m not watching this in a brain dead way, I’m watching it in an intellectual way” is what goes through my mind as I let the next episode of Love Is Blind, season six, start. Netflix’s “Next Episode” loading bar moves much too fast for me to stop it before the next installment auto-plays. The gesture - the illusion of an option - is nice I suppose. But it’s a token at best.

I’m not typically one to watch reality TV these days. I reveled in 2000s classics like American Idol, Survivor, and The Bachelor when I was a child - excellent television laden with outlandish conflict and circumstances for an already easily excitable brain. But with age, I have more often opted to unwind after dinner with whatever buzzy Hulu or Max original is airing that quarter. I’ve quietly suggested to myself that this is a marker of my maturity, that I now want to engage my mind with earnestly well-written and well-performed work in my designated leisure time, rather than material that ignites my neurotransmitters too rapidly. As I reach my hand back in the cookie jar, it’s clear that I’ve missed out on quite a lot of rich, delicious garbage - much of which unfortunately gives me more immediate pleasure than the dramedy of the moment. 

I tell myself and my friends that such material can be viewed through a “critical” lens because it makes me feel better about how much of my time I’ve devoted to Frankensteinian love game shows. On Love Is Blind, single people mingle with one another behind a wall before getting engaged, sight unseen. Over the next several weeks, the couples attempt life together in the “real world” outside of the “experiment” (they always use that word) and see if they’re able to go through with the marriage. My friends and I sneer at the television screen when men predictably lose all feelings for their fiancés after seeing their physical appearances fall short of their expectations. We complain about disingenuous participants of the “experiment,” many of whom have merely signed up for the show for fifteen seconds of Instagram fame and podcast appearances. We gasp at the infidelity, at the lies, at the inauthenticity, as if any of it is unexpected, all while grappling with what feels like a personal investment in the lives of strangers who are people-character hybrids, blends of fiction and reality.

My latest Love Is Blind binge is what many might call a “hate watch” - a viewing of a program either out of spite or to mock and jeer at it. What began as a close viewing under the shaky pretext of sociocultural “research” quickly devolved into an earnest commitment to peeling back the layers of TV villains with scorn for my own satisfaction. Seeking solidarity with my internet cohorts, I participated in the collective tar-and-feathering of bad reality television actors - the Jeremys, Jimmys, and Sarah Anns of the world. While seemingly heady on the surface, I think that hate consumption actually has a twisted way of grounding us - connecting us closer to our own morals, as well as other people.

Hating has a way of making us feel happier - as does cringing. Clinical psychologist JR Ilagan tells Vice that hate, love, and pleasure are all strong emotional responses. When experiencing such responses, serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin can be secreted. Additional studies have found that feeling any kind of potent emotion elicits a positive response, as opposed to feeling little. Anger, disgust, contempt - all often highly baked feelings. All rival numbness any day of the week.

Others argue that what we’re experiencing when we “hate consume” isn’t even hatred at all. TV critic Ryan McGee keenly tells Vox that when we genuinely hate something - we don’t engage with it. We shut the book, we turn off the TV, we press “unfollow.” In McGee’s eyes, when we “hate watch” something, we’re actually hating on its execution, “engaging with the potency of the idea versus the potency of its reality.” It’s not so much a fascination with an abomination, but a deeply vested interest in ideas that are tackled in a fashion we deem unseemly. In the case of Love Is Blind, the bleak state of modern dating and compulsory monogamy and heterosexuality are all meaty topics worthy of conversation. Our attention economy merely spits out the conversation in a manner that will garner the most engagement: a gamified, stupified humiliation showdown, with atomized, attention-starved participants at the ready. It’s hard to look away - to stop eating when it’s this chewable.

Recently, we’ve seen McGee’s theory on vivid display in what many are ironically referring to as the “personal essay industrial complex,” specifically personal essays published via The Cut. Every other week, it seems, The Cut has been publishing essays in which writers divulge easily hateable personal stories or details about themselves and their lives, which inevitably go viral on Twitter and draw fervent attention back to both the writers and the publication itself. The essays of this variety that I’ve been the most personally invested in involve a woman discussing the case for marrying an older man, another weighing the pros and cons of leaving her fractured marriage, and another explaining how she fell for an Amazon scam and handed a stranger $50,000 in a shoe box. 

All of these essays are technically well-written and contain topics of focus ripe for online discussion - misogyny, monogamy, the pervasiveness of technology and surveillance in daily life, etc. Their placement in a personal essay/op-ed format - in what many consider a reputable publication - makes them ripe for hate reading. As I read these stories - eyes widened, scrolling on my iPhone - I wasn’t sure what I believed less - that someone willingly divulged these details and opinions on such a large platform, or that the respected magazine willingly published them. Elevating what would otherwise arguably be Dr. Phil material gives us greater leverage to punch upwards.

Of course, the magazine likely knew that the essays would be received with a level of disdain - similar to how the writers and producers of reality television shows and made-for-TV movies know their work will inevitably be dunked on. These works act as sounding boards of sorts - catalysts for us to bounce ideas and beliefs off each other that we all already agree upon. We all already know that Americans getting engaged after speaking for a week and a half behind a wall will end in failure. We know women marrying older, richer men won’t solve issues stemming from systemic sexism and capitalism. We know it’s not as easy to fall in love as it is in Hallmarkland. We know not to give a stranger $50,000 in a shoe box. But boy, does it feel good to affirm these simple beliefs in the face of others’ grave errors - fictional and otherwise. Hate watching bestows viewers with a superiority soapbox, upon which we can step up and bark the things we’ve always thought at each other - wagging our fingers at examples of the opposite. Hate-watching brings us in closer touch with our own moral compass - allows us to identify good relationships, good art, and good ideas by showing us what we will surely disagree with. In this way, hate consumption is self-affirming, bringing us in closer touch with our truth.

However, hate consumption treads outside this self-affirming territory when it becomes too self-aware; when producers create hate bait - material that they know will cause buzz because of its outlandishness. The Cut essays are beginning to venture into this realm for me. Hating feels good because of its edgy nature - I don’t want to feel like I’m being coaxed into it. Conversely,

Delia Cai

’s Hate Read series on

Deez Links

is an example of hate consumption done tastefully because of its transparency, in my opinion. In this “pop-up newsletter,” anonymous writers rant about obscure and mostly trivial stuff they hate, including Taylor Swift’s outfits, media parties, and karaoke. Cai alludes to the intention of this clearly and humorously, writing that “in the end, sowing discord, snark and a healthy spray of cattiness is what really brings us all together.” 

Cai’s work is self-aware and honest. Gossip and identification of a common enemy - these are facets that have helped hold communities together for generations and have started and ended longstanding conflicts. When done in good fun, hate consumption can be harmless and hilarious. We all have media and cultural features that we can’t help but despise and are going to hate regardless of whether it’s vocalized or not - there’s little shame in releasing a little steam with a reality TV night, a rant session among friends, or even an innocuous blog post, purging yourself of the feeling like popping a whitehead on a zit.

But, of course, like all good things, the benefits of hating are best reaped when done in moderation. Since hate consumption does have such a self-affirming quality, it’s tempting to want to keep pressing the button - keep screaming at the television, keep hate stalking your favorite/least favorite influencer. But such efforts, when done in excess, place us in an echo chamber of our own making - hearing our distaste bounce off the walls until it gives us a headache. This phenomenon was recently explored well in Alexandra Tanner’s novel Worry, in which the protagonist’s addiction to hate-following mommy influencers, in part, drives her further away from her writing and addressing interpersonal conflicts. In addition, the influx of The Cut confessionals and Netflix original dating shows make me a bit fearful of the content types media companies are prioritizing - mirroring the TikTok landscape, further leaning into hateworthy spectacles over thoughtful material. 

As it turns out, it’s quite challenging to watch the love game shows through an entirely “intellectual” lens - after a certain number of hours, you do end up feeling quite brain dead. Shocker, I know. By the time I got to the Love Is Blind reunion, I found myself skimming the episode while I ate lunch, securing the cliff notes of who is still bitter and who is still in love, disappointed when people had resolved their pettiness, happy when they were still stewing. The hate watch had its time and place, but after a certain number of hours, it had turned my brain to soup - just as hate-following influencers had for many years. Like deleting TikTok from my phone, limiting hate consumption in my media diet is necessary. Like Halloween candy, some hate watches are good and a lot of them aren’t, especially after consuming for quite a while. In the end, we can’t thrive on junk food alone.

---