HOW TO HATE LIFE
13 SEPTEMBER 2022 (12 MIN READ)
We always read books and articles about how to be happy. Fuck, even I wrote one of those articles and felt all good about myself doing so. However, how many of us who read these sorts of pieces actually apply the philosophies being advocated? It’s one thing to read about how gratitude is the primary vehicle for happiness, versus actually spending time opening your heart and thanking the universe for all the blessings you have in your life on a daily basis. Since none of us really apply the knowledge we learn about happiness, why not try a different approach? How about discussing the primary things that make us fucking miserable? If hugging you with love and offering positive instructions didn’t work, then I think it’s time to punch you right in the mouth. And that’s what this article will attempt to do: show you how certain mental and behavioral patterns are making your life absolutely awful. So, join me on this cutthroat, direct approach, which shows you what you should do if you want to hate everything about life.
We often extract knowledge from people who are doing a kick ass job at loving life as guidance for how we can do the same. But for this article, I am going to be taking a page out of the book of the most miserable people on this planet. All the victims, the snowflakes, the alcoholics, the political extremists, and of course, those who spend their time creating fake social media accounts to troll people. These people are masters at one thing and one thing only: how to take a beautiful thing called life and turn it into absolute hell. We don’t give these people the credit they deserve, because if we use their glorious example, we can do the complete opposite things they do and find ourselves being the happiest people alive.
Fuck it, here it goes. Welcome to the guide of how to hate life. I hope you use it wisely. And by that I mean do not do anything I’m about to instruct you to do.
BLAME EVERYTHING BUT YOURSELF
The absolute best way to hate everything about life is to play a perfect blame game, in the sense of blaming absolutely anything for your problems but yourself. Back when I was fourteen, I was the blame game GOAT, like Michael Jordan dropping 35 plus points a game, I showed up every day and blamed at least 100 things for my problems. And man, I could not have possibly hated life any more. At the time, I was doing well below average in my classes, no girls gave me the time of day, I sat at the bottom of the bench for almost every sport (minus being a mediocre JV goalkeeper), and I had a gut that looked like a bowling ball. Instead of taking the time to work harder, sharpen my social skills, get better at sports, and stop eating so many damn Oreos, I took every second of my day to complain about how none of this was my fault. I thought the teachers secretly hated me because I was too smart. I genuinely believed that girls did not pay me any attention because they couldn’t handle how good of a guy I was. I concluded that coaches did not give me playing time due to the fact that they had something against me. And of course, I blamed my fat grandparents for my abysmal one-pack. At all costs, I refused to believe that I was at fault for the ailments in my life. Hell, not only was blaming the people around me not enough, I even used to cuss out God every night for actively taking his time to make my life terrible.
Unfortunately, about two years later, after nothing in my life changed at all, I somehow got the terrible idea to completely change my belief system, where I was the root of all my problems and the stories I was telling myself about myself were completely incorrect. Due to this idiotic discovery, I started to do very well in my classes, began dating hot girls, became a starter on the varsity basketball team, and rocked a humble four-pack. My dumb ass actually began enjoying life. What a sucker! So, please, never in a million years should you ever hold yourself accountable for your problems. Never forget that problems only exist to blame other people for them.
CREATE AN IDENTITY BASED ON YOUR PAIN
I once had a friend called Maria, and oh boy was she awesome at hating life. Just like my superpower was blame, hers was even more powerful: making her identity synonymous with her pain. Maria went through a bad breakup, where it turns out that her boyfriend cheated on her multiple times throughout the relationship. Instead of cutting her losses, processing the pain, and moving on, she had the amazing idea to create a whole new identity based on what had happened to her: a woman scorned who thinks all men are disgusting. Any time I would talk to her, she would go on and on about how vile men are and give dirty looks to every man on the street. She even spent her time alone, far away from men, consuming and creating content aligned with the hatred of men. Through this new identity, she quite literally became the fiery emotion of hate. I had never seen someone so miserable. It was truly inspiring! Unfortunately, once she met a good guy, she forgot all about that part of her and the hatred began leaving her body. I was so worried about her, since I genuinely believed she was about to begin enjoying life. But, thank God, she found a new identity that brought back that old side of her that hated life.
Maria had been struggling with anxiety as of late. She couldn’t exactly pinpoint what was causing it, and neither could her amazing therapist. Instead of refusing to stop searching for the root of it, which was her deep fear of not being enough for her parents, she bottled all that up and settled for writing anxiety on her forehead, creating a new identity of that of an anxious person. So, whenever anxiety came up and she was overthinking every scenario, she just told herself it was because she was an anxious person and refused to deal with the issues underneath. What a genius! Forever staying miserable because her identity was that of someone who is miserable, making it basically impossible to see herself as anything other than that. In the process, she put herself in a box of misery and did not allow for herself to see a way out. Thankfully, she never realized she was a human being having moments of anxiety based on repressed pain in her body. If she ever finds that out, then she would start enjoying life!
To summarize, to hate life to the highest degree, make sure you constantly create an identity based on what is hurting you most in this moment. Plus, make sure you refuse to see yourself as anything different than that at all costs.
ATTACHING SELF-WORTH TO EXTERNAL OUTCOMES
If those two vehicles for misery were still not enough for you, then this one is definitely going to break the ceiling. Let me present to you the almighty formula for perpetual unhappiness: once I get X, I will finally be Y. Plug in any one of your big goals for X and the feeling you are chasing underneath it as Y. Here are some common examples:
Once I marry a super hot chick, I will finally be respected.
Once I get this promotion, I will finally be confident.
Once I get this Lamborghini, I will finally be attractive.
Once I get this high-value man, I will finally be loved.
What this popular formula does is allow you to believe that an internal feeling you need in life will be given to you by an external source. Amazingly enough, once people end up getting that thing, they never feel the feeling they were chasing. They end up feeling exactly the same as when they decided they needed the thing in the first place! So, please, whenever you want to feel a certain way to upgrade your life, always make sure you attach its attainment to an external outcome. Because that way, you will never obtain the feeling. All you will get is misery and severe disappointment—two crucial ingredients to hating life!
What the idiots over at the happy camp do is make themselves feel the feeling they are chasing first, so they can be grateful and enjoy the moment when their goals come alive. For instance, if they sense themselves believing that they need a hot romantic partner to feel loved or confident, they then take that as an invitation to discover the blockages inside themselves that make them feel that way. Once they have freed those barriers themselves, and feel the feeling they were chasing through self-creation, they go out into the world and truly taste and appreciate their desires, without being so attached to them, since they know they can provide the feelings that come with them themselves. What a fucking terrible strategy. Why would you not want to be so attached to outcomes as a way to make yourself feel good? The outcomes never happen in the way you want them to, so you always end up upset. What’s better than that? Maybe this next guiding step on how to hate life.
BELIEVING YOUR THOUGHTS
Our brains are designed to provide us with thoughts that make us feel safe from threats. Back in the days before modern society, this was super useful, as we were frequently at the threat of an attack from wild animals or neighboring tribes competing for resources. Due to this fearful reality, we had to both somatically and intellectually be at a constant state of fight or flight for our survival. And those who survived the best—the scared over-thinkers—were the people who drove the adaptation of our genes, making our current brains the result of this natural selection. However, we no longer face the same threats we once did. What used to be a potential lion hiding behind the bushes gets unconsciously reinterpreted as a new romantic interest who may not like you. As you can see, our brains cannot adjust to the safety and comfort of modern times without our own conscious intervention. So, instead of getting in the way, detaching from your thoughts, and watching them float over you, you must believe every single one. That voice in your mind that tells you to not start that new creative project because everyone will think you are a loser is always right. You have to constantly trust it. There’s a reason why those thought believers back in the day were the ones who survived! You would be doing your ancestors a disservice if you did not follow in their footsteps, so use this gift they left us at all costs. Reflecting the beauty of this gift, if you observe any person exhibiting severe depression or anxiety, then you will notice how they are just people who believed too many of their thoughts. We must follow their lead!
BATHE IN YOUR CHILDHOOD TRAUMA
You may read that title and reflexively assume that I’m talking about constantly reliving your traumatic moments from childhood, playing them out over and over again in your mind. Although this can definitely stir up a lot of negative emotions in the body, I know a way to handle this sort of pain in an even more costly manner: constantly repress and forget about it. What happens when you repress your childhood trauma—such as forcing yourself to forget about how a parent may have abused you or pushing aside certain painful moments that shaped the formulation of your brain—is that it begins to act through you unconsciously. This unconscious behavioral compass means that your repressed pain will feed most of your thoughts without your knowledge, which then leads to you taking action from a source of painful fuel that you have no clue lives inside you. So, in sequence, your repressed pain feeds you dark thoughts, which you perceive as normal, that then create the actions you take. To show an example of how this process works, consider the story of the X-Men villain, Magneto, whose parents were killed in the holocaust and repeatedly watches people he loves get killed because of their genetic makeup. Instead of moving through the pain and allowing it to breed compassion, he swallows all of it and lets it feed him thoughts that all revolve around the concept of vengeance, such as, “Anyone that is different to me will eventually try to kill me, so I should kill them first.” His repressed pain of losing people he loves due to discrimination feeds him thoughts that make him want to hand people the same pain he’s feeling, in the form of killing them and the ones they love. However, all that did was make the pain he was feeling exponentially worse.
Although Magneto is an extreme example, his story shows how allowing our repressed (childhood) pain to fuel our mental stories only creates actions aligned with that pain, such as making people feel the same feelings you felt as a kid. And when all you do is make people hurt the way you hurt, you end up making your hurt hurt even more. So, to follow Magneto’s lead, please make sure you never address your trauma, especially your childhood ones, because if you do, you would become aware of what is actually driving your negative, painful thoughts. And once you become aware of the pain fueling your thoughts and process it, the thoughts go away, as well as the miserable actions that come with them. Thus, in order to make sure you frequently commit actions that cause pain to yourself and others, never face or attempt to understand the underlying pain fueling the thoughts that lead to those actions.
BAD HABITS
The last stepping stone to living a miserable life is both the most simple one, but also the most necessary. And it goes like this: whatever pain you avoid with a bad habit, the universe will keep handing the pain back to you until you learn to face it. And the more stubborn you are to face it, the more intense the pain will start to feel, hence why you sense the urgent need to numb the pain when it arrives through a bad habit like drinking alcohol or watching porn. So, if you are avoiding a core wound of yours, such as being terrified of people’s negative perception of you, then keep numbing that pain with a bad habit! The wound will not only never leave you this way, but it will keep getting more unbearable. Wow, what an amazing cheat code for a miserable life. Enjoy!
