Maybe no one deserves our hatred.

When I was younger, I used to hate a lot. For the simplest reasons, I’d tell someone that I hated them due to something they did to me — I’d even tell my parents “I HATE YOU”, just cause they wouldn’t give me ice cream. It was very simple back then: they do something to you, and you hate them for it. However, as someone older it gets much more complicated.

Of course, we can’t hate someone for no reason. Even if we say you did, science and psychology will say otherwise — explanations such as on-group out-group theory, projection phenomenon, social identity theory, and many more will be given to us to interpret our actions.

Psychology helps explain human behavior and patterns. It can tell us why certain groups of people hate other groups. It can explain why you might feel this way or that way. How we project our insecurities to other people we feel uncomfortable with. However, no theory can fully explain what it feels like to be that certain person, living that specific life.

Looking back when I was a kid it was laughable how I hated the people I said I hated. It makes me wonder if everyone or did anyone experience the same as I did. The thought keeps taking me back to the word “sonder”.

Sonder means that every passerby is living as vivid, complex, and central to them as yours is to you. That guy you saw sitting at the park today? That classmate of yours that annoys you? That workmate of yours that does nothing? They have burdens that you can never see. Everyone of us is dealt a different hand than others, and we must play it.

A single fall — however big or small, whenever or wherever in their path — can change a person. Make them do bad things. Each of us can make mistakes, and has their own flaws that can’t change in an instant. All of us have the capacity to fix and change those mistakes and flaws, even if some people choose not to.

Others might say that certain people deserve the hatred pointed towards them — “it’s their karma for doing those things”, but we are not the ones who get to decide whether a person deserves to be hated or not. No one gets to decide who deserves hatred . Why? Because we are all humans, imperfect and circumstance shaped humans — living, time-bound, dying humans.

This doesn’t mean you can excuse harmful actions, justice still prevails. Someone can do the most heinous acts, but they deserve a chance to fix themselves and change for the better — we can hold them accountable without hating them.

Hating people will only imprison us in the past. Not only does hatred hurt the person we direct it to, but it also hurts the one carrying it.

You can dislike a person, be angry at them, and even ignore them. Being hateful to them, however, is too much — it hurts you and the one you hate. Why hate another human being that has a life as vivid and as complex as yours?