What Hate Says About You

A lot of people nowadays take a tone online that gives them away before they even finish their sentence. A jadedness. A bitterness that feels too easy to recognize once you’ve heard it enough. They’ll call it honesty. They'll dress it up as discernment. But if you listen closely, you realize they’re not saying anything about the world. They’re saying something about themselves.

Scroll long enough on any social media app and you’ll see it: people talking about what they “require” in a partner, in friends, in others. Long lists. Carefully curated standards. At first glance, it reads like clarity. Like they know what they want. But the longer you sit with it, the more it feels like a mirror held up to their own inadequacies. Not standards, but self-judgment turned outward.

People reveal what they’re missing when they speak about what they demand. Nowhere is this clearer than with physical appearance. You’ll see someone tear into others for a multitude of traits, but what they’re really doing is dragging their own reflection into public view and trying to spit on it before anyone else can.

The obsession with looks, this compulsive need to rank, critique, and dissect, is never about the person being targeted. It’s about the person doing the talking. They haven’t made peace with how they look, so they point the blade at someone else to carry the shame. And the moment someone walks into a room with the thing they wish they had, it sets them off, because it reminds them of everything they’ve tried to hide.

It’s projection, plain and simple. Not in a vague pop psychology sense, but in the real, daily way people offload what they can’t accept about themselves. They don’t even know they’re doing it. Or maybe they do, and they’re hoping no one else notices.

But people do notice. I notice. I see it every single day.

You can tell when someone’s words don’t come from insight but from bruised pride and bitterness. You can feel when someone’s critique is just a poorly disguised cry for help. That feeling doesn’t lie. And it isn’t just in what they post online. It’s in how they carry themselves in real life. You can see it in their eyes, especially when what they say is soaked in hate and masked as opinion. There’s an emptiness there that always tells the truth.

Look at any post tearing someone down for how they look, dress, speak, or carry themselves. Watch the energy it takes to maintain that tone. Now ask yourself: what kind of inner world would drive someone to speak that way? There is only unrest. It’s bitterness wearing a fake confident mask.

Some people live in this posture. They become it. The mean girl persona isn’t just some high school character on TV. You see it in grown adults who never learned how to process their own discomfort with themselves. They judge to distract. Critique to hide. Smile as they rip someone to shreds behind their back, all while quietly coming apart behind their eyes.

There are whole communities built on this. Take a look at r/Fauxmoi, the various “snark” subreddits, or the comment section on any video. Entire forums and pages full of people who gather to share the weight of their misery by handing it off to whoever happens to be in the spotlight that day. And what’s always true, without exception, is that this kind of cruelty doesn’t stem from power. It comes from lack.

That’s what these people don’t see. You don’t tear others looks down when you’ve made peace with yourself. You don’t sit behind a screen trying to dissect someone else’s life if you’re living one you respect. It’s always the people with the most unspoken insecurities who reach the fastest for a target. They’ll tell you it’s just jokes. That it’s just honesty. But there’s nothing funny or honest about hating what you see in the mirror and trying to make sure no one else likes their reflection either.

What someone chooses to hate usually tells you more than what they say they love. Love has no urgency. No sharpness. It doesn’t beg to be heard. Hate though, especially the kind baked into judgment, has a vile tone. It sounds defensive, jaded, even scared.

If you catch yourself slipping into it, ask who you’ve become. Ask yourself who the fuck are you to judge. Not rhetorically. Ask like your life depends on it. Because this stuff builds. It calcifies. If you let it root, it stops being something you do and becomes who you are. And no amount of sarcasm or pseudo-wisdom will fix the rot in your soul if you don’t call it by its name.

You’ll never see a person who’s truly at peace with who they are spend their time trying to humiliate or belittle others. Not in person. Not online. Not anywhere. That kind of attention-seeking only matters when you’re empty.

There’s nothing noble in bitterness. And no amount of cruelty passed off as wit will cover the fact that, deep down, you might hate yourself more than anyone you’re mocking.

Fix that. Or at the very least, stop bleeding on people who aren’t the ones who cut you.

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