Emotions

Hatred Is Like Fast Food

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Hatred is like fast food. Fast food tastes really good while you’re ingesting it but there’s no real nutrition there, and if you eat too much of it for too long you end up facing serious health consequences. So it’s a short-term gratifier with long-term disastrous effects. Hatred is the same way.

We hate because we feel like victims and we can’t stand to be in that victim role. We feel like some person, group, or entity is responsible for our victimhood and we want to punish them for it. When we let that hatred bubble up inside of us and then spill out into the world we don’t feel like victims anymore. We feel like righteous, conquering heroes.

But that hatred slowly eats away at us. It turns us into twisted, emotionally crippled versions of who we really are. It sours our daily functioning and our important relationships since where hatred is love is not and where love is hatred is not. When we spend most of our time in a state of hatred accessing and sharing our love becomes more and more difficult, more and more rare, until that hatred becomes an all consuming fire that burns us alive.

Hatred, just like fast food, can look and taste appealing but it’s really a poison, a poison that courses through our psyches and prevents us from mental and emotional health. Before long it’s no longer us making the decisions about how we’re going to think, feel, and act in the world, it’s our hatred making those decisions for us. We hate because we want whoever or whatever we feel is getting in the way of our happiness to pay the price for it but we end up paying the price. We might be able to derive some pleasure, some grim satisfaction, out of hating but we never under any circumstances derive authentic happiness out of hating. Love and happiness go hand in hand just like hatred and unhappiness go hand in hand. Choosing hatred is choosing unhappiness.