A “hater,” particularly within the context of social media and online interaction, is someone who persistently criticizes, demeans, or expresses hostility toward a person, group, or achievement, often from a position of perceived anonymity. Haters criticize by negative emotions rather than reason.
Typical hater behavior:
Posting disparaging comments on others’ content (e.g., success stories, appearances, opinions).
Minimizing or invalidating achievements, typically by attributing them to luck, corruption, or superficiality.
Engaging in personal attacks, mockery, or ridicule.
Demonstrating persistent negative focus on a particular person or type of success (e.g., wealth, attractiveness, fame).
Where a true critic aims to engage constructively or offer correction, a hater's goal is to undermine, hurt, or discredit, typically publicly and repeatedly. Hater behavior is rooted in insecurity, envy, and threatened self-concept.
Social Comparison and Inferiority: According to social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954), individuals assess their value by comparing themselves to others. In the online world, where curated images of success, beauty, wealth, and confidence are ubiquitous, this can trigger negative self-evaluation. Haters often respond by attacking those they perceive as above them to reassert a sense of superiority or equality.
Projection and Externalization: Freud’s concept of defense mechanisms applies here: rather than acknowledging their inadequacies, failures, or insecurities, haters project these feelings outward. By demeaning others, they attempt to externalize blame for their dissatisfaction with life or self.
Narcissistic Injury and Ego Threat: Individuals with fragile self-esteem, especially those with narcissistic traits, may experience others’ success as a direct threat to their ego. Instead of self-reflection or growth, the response is rage, scorn, or belittlement.
Anonymity and Deindividuation: Online environments provide a degree of anonymity and distance, which leads to deindividuation—a psychological state where individuals lose self-awareness and are less restrained by social norms. This facilitates aggressive, unempathetic, or impulsive behavior that the person might suppress in face-to-face interactions.
Identity and Group Affiliation: Sometimes hater behavior is tribal: aligned with group identity, ideology, or aesthetics. For example, a person may hate a public figure not for personal reasons but because that figure represents a competing group or value system.
A hater is not simply someone who disagrees or offers critique but someone driven by emotional dysfunction—particularly envy, insecurity, and resentment—to attack, belittle, or undermine others. In other words, the hater is the anti-Stoic.
The hater is the perfect antithesis of the Stoic. The hater’s entire world is defined by rabid negative perception followed by impulsive negative action, the perfect opposite of Stoic virtue and the four pillars of virtue.
Courage: The hater is first and foremost a coward. The hater typically hides and criticizes from a safe distance or criticizes from within a group as part of the mob. The hater never stands alone, proudly, and to your face.
Justice: The hater operates from irrational emotion with one-and-only-one goal: to belittle and reduce the power of another regardless of reason.
Temperance: The hater has no temperance, always unleashing maximum vitriol immediately.
Wisdom: The hater not only never investigates or seeks to understand, they specifically avoid critical thinking and honest academic discussion. Honest and enlightened discourse undermines the haters’ only goal, to make others feel less worthy thereby making themselves feel (falsely) more worthy by comparison.
Perfectly unstoic, the hater is moved uncontrollably from emotion to action, without thinking. The hater sees the object of their hate, and this immediately causes negative feelings of inferiority. Then, without thinking they lash out. Afterward, the hater doubles down, telling themselves, “they deserved it” and “that will show them.”
As Stoics, we have the perfect response; Stoicism is both the cure for the hater’s disease (should they choose to treat and cure themselves) and is the perfect and impenetrable armor against them.
Haters are ruled by passion, not reason. Pay them no mind.
When you wake up, tell yourself: today I will meet the meddler, the ungrateful, the arrogant, the deceitful, the envious, and the unsocial. They are this way because they do not know the good and the evil.—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.1
You will never reach your destination if you stop to throw stones at every dog that barks.—Unknown
Do not take haters personally. They act from mental illness.
When someone does you wrong, it is because he believes it is right. He is mistaken. But if you understand this, you will pity him, not be angry.—Epictetus, Discourses 1.18
Do not respond in kind. You must never become them.
The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.6
If you are insulted, remember that it is not he who insults you that harms you, but your opinion that you are insulted.—Epictetus, Enchiridion 20
They are noise, not signal. Treat them as such.
If anyone despises me, that is their problem. My only concern is not doing or saying anything deserving of contempt.—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 11.28
You should not give circumstances the power to rouse anger, for they do not care.—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.38
Do not expect to live without them.
You must know that such people exist. They always have. Your job is not to expect the world to change but to be unmoved by its flaws.—paraphrased from Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 10.36
Above all, remember this: the more haters you have and the angrier they get, the better you’re doing. Use the hater as a Stoic mirror. They are your opposite, your mirror image; the more they hate, the louder they scream, and the more of them there are, it simply means you reflect their opposite that much more, and they can’t stand it.
Good.
I never get mad at people who talk behind my back. They are precisely where they are supposed to be—behind and beneath me.—The Strategic Stoic
I never get mad at people who critisze me anonymously. They are doing exactly what cowards are supposed to be doing—hiding from me.—The Strategic Stoic
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