Live and let live.

Anyone active on social media would have had a few encounters with haters. Haters I feel is a term so aptly coined in this era to identify people who provide no positive experience for people in their circle/friend list but are able to spurt out random hostilities and project their weaknesses onto others.

I have had a brief encounter recently with a person with these traits and I wrote the following after an introspection of the person's response to a post I did in the context of the person's behaviour over the last many years.

'When someone cannot reply your message, can not 'like' a single post of yours for years on end despite knowing you personally since birth, can not give a simple thumbs up even if it means just a press of a key on the keyboard, BUT, can suddenly emerge from their hiding to voice their disagreement on your post, worded with so much disregard to age, relationship and the political/economical situation that would have necessitated that post, it means that that person has been harbouring a lot of animosity and resentment on you.

Such animosity and resentment stems from deep rooted jealously. Some people feel that they must have the best of everything - grades, looks, health, career achievements, family, children, society recognition etc. When they feel others are surpassing them on these, they disapprove of those people. And hence the instant rebuttal. They turn the tables around very quickly upon hearing positive achievements of others by asserting that a person's worth should not be tied to things that are outwardly measurable, but should instead be measured by the 'quality' of their soul, mind and other abstract notions that are very vague and subjective.

I see that these people have a way of categorizing others in their head - evident from the reshares of quotes and stories. The first category is the good people category (made up of them and similar species they have an affinity with) and the 'evil people' category (which is made of up of basically everyone else whose achievements threaten their own). They teach themselves to relate the outwardly successful with 'evil' and themselves, who they regard as inwardly (soul-wise, mind-wise) successful with heavenly goodness.

To prove that they are inwardly successful and hence are 'praise-and-worship-worthy', they will try to associate themselves with complex notions such as delusional martyrdom and social misfit-ism. Delusional martyrdom can be illustrated with an example - while other single people will say that they have yet to meet their true love, these people will say that why get married and start a family as all it does is increase the burden on the sacred Mother Earth. Apparently, they are sacrificing their lives to make up for the mess upon Earth created by happily married people. What's really on their mind is 'How come other people have great married lives and I don't?!'

Social misfit-ism is another facade deployed by these people. They like to imply that their minds and souls are so above others, almost reaching divine levels, that they find all other humans too petty in their need to enjoy life's little joys such as being together, travelling, celebrating little events, sharing their feelings, etc. They feign such indifference to others in their bid to attract attention to themselves. This they imply very loudly by echoing saintly statements about life, the soul, humanity and the universe.'

The irony of all these is, these haters never leave the social media. Some hide in inactive profiles and see what everyone else is doing. Some with more active profiles reshare selected posts with such intensity to prove their point and to shove their superiority down the throat of others. At the end of the day, they just cling to the society tighter than anyone else would.

If you have such people in your circle, know that haters make up less than 0.01% of the population. If you can, tell these people off before they get carried away with the habit of projecting hostility and shooting other people down with twisted logics. Haters are not without choice. If society and celebration of life bothers them too much, they can always deactivate their profiles and go back into their caves. They will certainly not be missed.