Pricey James: Should the Haters Hate?

Editor’s Word: Is something ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Each Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Inform him about your lifelong or in-the-moment issues at dearjames@theatlantic.com.

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Pricey James,

The world has so many haters. How will we cope with this as a collective?

Pricey Reader,

Are we a collective? I suppose we’re. Doesn’t really feel prefer it proper now—which after all is the purpose of your query.

Hate, for me, is available in two most important varieties.

There’s elemental hate—dead-eyed, regular, implacable hate—which I are likely to suppose has a demonic origin, as a result of it runs counter to creation. It’s infernally reductive, stripping the life out of the whole lot: the hater and the hated, equally dehumanized. Fortunately this sort of hate is pretty uncommon. Once you meet it, run.

Then there’s spazzy, jazzy, freewheeling, comes-in-ragged-blasts hate—the type that the majority of us are acquainted with. Day-to-day hate, petty hate. It shakes our brains, shakes our methods, is sort of frivolous within the randomness of its objects: this driver, that YouTuber, these folks in line on the pharmacy. This type of hate is changing into extra prevalent, as a result of it has the whole lot to do with our present state of psychic atomization and distance from each other. It’s love going backward, badly disrupted connective power searching for a house.

What will we do about it? God is aware of. Identify it. Acknowledge it when it rises up—and detach. Throw our smartphones away. Unplug our egos. Get off Amazon Prime. Cease listening to big-mouth podcasts. Breathe deeply. Be nicer to our bizarre neighbors. Be nicer to our bizarre selves. How’s that?

Exhaling peaceable platitudes,

James

Pricey James,

I’m exasperated by the overuse of the phrase existential—the fashionable time period everybody appears to be utilizing to fill speeches and printed articles. Additionally: consequential. I’d have anticipated The Atlantic to chorus. Sigh.

Pricey Reader,

Phrases I overuse: cosmic, vibe, flaming (or fiery), wild, harrowing, psychic. The rationale for that is that I stay in a wild and flaming cosmos, and my psyche is harrowed by its vibes. Equally, existential and consequential are having a second as a result of we stay in existential, consequential instances. On this—to make use of Auden’s line—what devices now we have agree.

(Additionally: We’ve no good synonyms for existential. Consider me, I’ve appeared.)

Doing photographs of language,

James

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