So now that I have you here…

What is it about drama that the world just can’t get enough of?

There seems to be little else that satisfies and thrills us more than a fight, gossip, or a burn.

Let’s be honest, we’ve probably all clicked on this piece hoping to see a writer go off the rails and call a bunch of people a few choice words, to read a piece about hatred, or to witness someone get their warped idea of revenge on somebody else.

It’s the guilty pleasure we’ve all indulged in so many times that it has become not so guilty anymore.

Drama (and the negativity it brings) has become such an integral part of our society, part of our culture, and part of our mindset, and though we may not be the type of person who wants to be in the thick of it, too often we find ourselves relishing in it as observers and bystanders.

Whether it’s watching through a TV, a mobile phone, or our own eyes; hatred is being broadcast to the world at a frightening rate, and we are lapping it up constantly – forever thirsty for more.

Everyday there seems to be something new to hate, and even less to like.

Our lives are bombarded with content, and the numbers are showing that our love-to-hate mentality is skyrocketing.

In the 24-hour news cycle that is modern life, we make mountains out of molehills, and are faster than ever at demonising any and every one.

We’re in the culture of tearing people down, having scapegoats to bury for our entertainment, to then leave behind without a second thought.

A name trending on Twitter in a worldwide pile-on.

Would it not be better to try and affect a change from someone’s mistakes rather than just attacking them?

We bring these people down for doing the wrong thing, call them names, then move on – without having actually changed anything for the better.

We also love to destroy things that others build.

Multiple op-eds spread far and wide about why a new television show isn’t worthy of our attention;

Why an artist’s album has ‘flopped’, and why a movie has ‘bombed’ at the box-office;

Reading about marriage breakdowns, mental breakdowns, or really just any kind of breakdown that we can get our hands on. We swallow the click bait whole.

We may disagree with what they say, but every click, retweet and reply we give back to them is reason enough to continue promoting this kind of message.

TV executives are now capitalising on the drawcard that is hatred and are injecting it into the place where we go to escape the world in thirty-minute instalments (minus the ad-breaks).

We can’t watch someone trying to find love without having someone there to hate;

Watch a show about building a house without having a couple to tear-down;

We couldn’t even keep the concept of a cooking show without adding a fight at a dinner table to keep the audiences pouring in.

It’s so much easier to get an audience to hate someone, than it is to get an audience to fall in love with them.

Why try and pick someone that has mass appeal, when it is so much easier to pick someone who will rub everyone the wrong way and become instantly and universally despised?

With the news we see every day on our screens of real tragedy, we have become addicted to the worst that humanity has to offer.

But instead of focusing on fixing a problem, we are searching for more drama wherever we can.

We don’t celebrate what we love, we seem to revel in what we hate.

Devoting hours of our time and energy into arguing via a keyboard with virtual brick walls, constantly trying to fight ideas and identities that will only die from a lack of oxygen.

The worst part – people profit off of this stuff.

The word ‘troll’ has never been more relevant than it is right now.

We have people achieving fame and notoriety by knowing exactly the wrong thing to say at exactly the right time – and with every retort served back to them, their sense of self-importance soars.

It is through taking their bait, time after time, that we allow their hatred to continue, and their message to spread further and louder.

They may take on the identity of a ‘columnist’, a ‘personality’, or a ‘shock jock’, but they are simply there to divide and to be hated.

Everyday, promoting ideas to get us fired up.

They gain just as much from being unpopular as they would from being the opposite.

These people don’t have fans, which should be a good thing – but it isn’t.

They instead have followers; people who don’t buy into who they are, but buy into what they promote, or the way they make others feel – good or bad.

So they are interchangeable.

When one is cut off, one will grow back in their place, and they don’t need to be liked personally to gain a following, they just continue spewing the same hatred as the one that came before them.

Their goal – to elicit a reaction.

We keep on buying into it, so they keep on selling it.

The platforms are there, the antagonists are ready, and on and on it continues.

People and businesses alike, cashing in on division.

There seems to be no real reason to have comments available on news articles other than to watch them descend into a chaotic stream of name-calling, threats and hatred.

People take their sides, and the war of words begins.

From this, life has become about winning a fight rather than doing what’s right.

We all want to be on the winning side of an argument,

Whether it’s a political party, or a social movement – we’d much rather an ‘I told you so’ moment to hold over the head of someone who disagrees with us, than see change come to the world from someone or something we don’t support.

We’re so quick to try and lay blame on a person or a movement when a tragedy occurs that we divert attention away from working together to actually stop the problem ever happening again.

Instead we stand on the sidelines, shouting about why the ideas we hold are the best ones – using heartbreak to further fuel our hatred and animosity for anyone who dares to disagree.

There to yell when someone wrongs us, then the first ones to tell them to ‘lighten up’ and ‘stop being so sensitive’ when we wrong them right back.

Anything you can do, I can do better.

The world has drawn itself so many dividing lines, with keyboard warriors waking up every day to continue on with the unnecessary fighting and outpouring of negativity, that it takes little to nothing to have us tearing at each other’s throats.

What has got us here, to this place?

Is it a form of escapism to place blame onto someone else for the problems in our world? Or do we think that putting someone down will help bring ourselves up?

Are we hiding behind unified hatred in the hopes that it gives us an identity?

Toxicity as a lifestyle isn’t anything new, but it seems to be getting louder and louder every day.

Whether it’s someone we know, or someone we don’t – we’re always so quick to say something negative about somebody else – friend or foe.

It’s been drilled into us from a young age that girls gossip and are catty because they ‘just are’, and that boys yell and fight to solve their problems.

Hatred and anger are seen as a rite of passage, something to shrug and say ‘oh well’ about.

We’ve normalised it to such a degree that those that do their best to avoid or minimise negativity are seen as cowardly or supressing things that ought to be ‘let out’ – lest it be unhealthy for them to keep it all bottled up.

We see negativity as something cathartic, when really those that try and bring a light into the world are just simply working harder than us.

When we project our anger and hatred onto others, instead of dealing with it ourselves, we pass that burden onto someone else,

An insidious game of pass-the-parcel, slowly seeping further out into the world, infecting everything it touches.

Why is it that feeling anger comes so much easier than feeling joy does?

Forever fastest to hate rather than to love.

Finding it easier to criticise than to support.

Forever saying we want to live in a peaceful world, then promoting anger and division in so many different forms throughout our day-to-day lives.

But negativity thought, and negativity projected, is not something we can just turn off.

As much as we’d like to, we cannot wake up feeling unquestionably happy and joyful every day, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not something to strive for.

Being positive is a vow to take, and something we must work on every day.

When we’re worn down, tired and at the end of our tether, that’s when negativity seeps into our minds and out into our lives.

That’s the moment when it takes so much more energy to bite our tongue, to take a deep breath, and to walk away.

So often, our thoughts become our actions, and our actions become our reality. So if our world is simply what we each give to it, then we can change the world by tasking ourselves to start thinking differently.

We can be a part of a world where we focus on living our own lives to the fullest, and allow others to do the same.

Where we aren’t constantly setting out to tear each other down in ways big or small,

But it starts with us being the change we want to see.

There’s no escaping the real horrors of the world that are reported every day, but that doesn’t mean that that same negativity and feeling needs to bleed into everything else we do.

We need to support the good and turn our backs on the bad,

We need to be fiercer friends, and braver adversaries.

To focus on what we each enjoy in life and give that to the world.

So bring your talents, your passions and your love to the surface, and leave the hatred to those who have nothing better to offer.

Read about heroes, about love, and those things that bring positivity into the world, and scroll past the clickbait of bitterness.

Bring down those that seek to bring harm to the world, and leave those that harm others by spewing hatred for validation to peter themselves out – alone and cynical.

Why is it human nature to leave everything in ashes?

We need a wake-up call about what it means to be here, and what can be achieved by one person in a lifetime.

If we decided to no longer measure our idea of a good life as being one filled with financial wealth and rewards, and instead lived our lives in the hopes of making someone else’s better – or at the very least not making anyone else’s worse – so many of the problems plaguing our world could be gone with so little effort.

To make the world a better place, we need the energy to fight the things that are truly wrong first,

And writing an article about burning back those who may have burned us, is not the right place to start.

 

Write For Your Fight is taking a stand against senseless negativity. We strive to bring hope and good into the world with our words, and will continue to do so every day. Sure, it may not be as juicy or as popular as a piece tearing people down – but life is too short to be somewhere for hatred to fester.