FRATPACKER WORLD.

As a 32, turning 33, year old I believe myself to be big brother but with the younger generations and to the kids I guess I’m uncle aka malume aka unc and honestly, I’m cool with that. IT’s a new day and age and some terms have been shifted and new terms being made every day. One terminology that I don’t love and hate to see is hate watching and I believe we should all hate it and I’ll explain why.

Now if you’ve never heard of the term, ‘hate-watching’, before it’s pretty self-explanatory. Hate-watching is when you purposefully watch someone, a team, a performance, a movie etc. with the sole mission of hating on it and hoping for the worst outcome for said person, team or whatever it is that you are watching. At first it makes sense and is deeply relatable to everyone. Who hasn’t had some stored-up feelings whether it be jealousy, envy, anger, hate, betrayal, being snubbed or robbed, underserving of, you know feelings of someone or something that is achieving or celebrating something that you thought they didn’t necessarily earn or deserve? We’re all humans, right? It’s okay for us to have and feel these emotions. What’s not okay is letting these emotions run to the point where they control us and our actions.

It sounds dramatic at first but have you ever been around a group of friends and everyone is talking about the upcoming basketball/football/tennis or whatever sport match and you hear someone say, “I’m just watching to see *insert team here* lose.”, and in your head you’re like, “What?!?!”, you’re watching the sport with the pure intention of hating and praying on another team’s downfall instead of just watching because you love the sport and hoping to see a really great game between two exciting teams? A better example would be in the music world, more specifically in the Hip-Hop culture. If we look 3 years back to the great Kendrick Lamar and Drake beef when the two rappers were battling against each other in front of the whole world, it was a great time but the aftermath that came was horrible for the culture of fans. Whenever one of these artists drops now, instead of, “Hey, I’m excited to listen to this new album.”, we’re hearing more, “Oh they just dropped? I can’t wait to listen to how trash this album is.”, or, “Oh he dropped, I’m not even giving it a listen.”.

We’re at the point where our hate is overriding our love and it’s not just stuck to sports and music. Movies, TV, people, I believe even animals are catching the smoke as well. I don’t know when or where it started exactly but I hate to see it. I know the irony. The reason why I hate it is because when you take away the love from watching something you love or enjoy you take away the beauty of it and your sense of being able to appreciate the diversity and variety that that one thing you love and enjoy can bring to you. We get so caught up in hate watching that we talk all about the negatives of a team or person or art form. We get the background stories and lore of why we should hate one team or person but rarely do we hear why we should be supporting and loving the other team they are up against.

I mean even on the team being hated on, I stop and ask myself, “Okay but if they’re here in this position for you to hate on them they surely must be great at some aspect of the thing we’re watching?”, or maybe it’s just me and I’m the crazy one. I remember back in high school when Manchester United was on top and reigning. Did people hate the Manchester United fan base and their egos? Yes. Did people hate see Manchester United winning multiple titles? Yes. Did people still tune-in to watch Manchester United because they could appreciate the football they played and the greatness of the players that were playing on that team? Yes. It felt back then that you could not be in support of a team but there wasn’t this hate-watching of tuning in to pray on their downfall but tuning in to catch a beautiful game of football and that the opposing team would play an amazing enough of a game to defeat Manchester United.

It was love watching. Watching for the love of the game. Investing into teams and players, hoping that they would get better to beat the ones on top and which just led to hoping for the sport in itself to grow holistically and produce better performances and games for us to view and participate in. With music you’d able to listen to your favourite artist’s rival and appreciate they made an amazing body of work that touched other the ears and hearts of the masses and because of that it would make you want to support and cheer your favourite artist to make a project just as amazing if not better than the rival’s. It wasn’t praying that we get sh*tty music from people because if we are all praying that the people, we don’t like release bad music then how does music grow and how do we get a wide range of great music?

For me hate is the removal of love and once you remove love from the equation of anything it starts to lead to its downfall. Do we not want to see great movies, tv series, music, sports team and players all around? If we keep sh*tting on each other when do we have time to appreciate and uplift all the good and great that is being done around us. You think you’re hate watching but the hate is blinding you from seeing and living in the greatness of our time. Put the hate down and just do it for the love of it. Love is free but all this hating is going to cost us and rob us of our joy and I truly hate to see it.