Haters gonna hate (hate, hate, hate, hate) 💃

A mindset shift that might change the way you feel about showing up online

If you’ve ever balked at the idea of existing in online spaces because of potential negative comments, I hear you. We are not designed to open ourselves up to commentary on our lives, and yet somehow, we’ve normalised it to the point where we think it’s totally acceptable to openly criticise other people from behind a screen.

Here’s the thing about social media: it’s never about you. The passive aggressive commenter who always watches your Instagram stories? It’s their stuff, not yours. The person who can’t resist having a dig at the way you choose to show up online? It’s on them to do the work and find out exactly why they’re triggered. It’s the grown up version of ‘I’m rubber and you’re glue’ - whatever you say is just going to slide right off me, babe, because it was never about me in the first place, and you’ve just revealed waaaay more about yourself than you probably meant to.

If we can view negative comments as a reflection on the commenter, not the person being commented on, then we can take the power back for ourselves. There’s nothing more powerful than showing up in your life completely as yourself, so if you’re going to have a presence online, you may as well do it on your own terms. Haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, as the great T. Swift once said.

It’s actually quite sad that we feel the need to publicly shame or criticise people in online spaces. I’m all for healthy, respectful debate, but there’s a biiiiiiig difference between that and just plain nastiness. In my experience, the Negative Nancies who show up in the comments often feel that they have been personally wronged by your content, and therefore need to vehemently protest its existence in their feed.

The concept of just scrolling past the stuff that isn’t serving you is long gone. If I had a food account and posted a pasta recipe with peas in it, you can guarantee that someone will comment ‘what if I don’t like peas? Why haven’t you thought about me?’. If I was a new mother posting about my motherhood journey, someone will undoubtedly feel personally victimised by my choice to bottle feed instead of breastfeed. The point is, we simply cannot please everyone, and that’s OK. Who wants to live their entire life in pursuit of other people’s pleasure at the expense of our own? Not me.

Maybe - and this is a radical idea, so buckle up - maybe, we should just engage with the accounts we actually like, and leave it at that (wishful thinking, I know). Nevertheless, as a social media manager, I’m creating something that is greater than the sum of its parts for my clients: a community, carefully nurtured and grown and tended to like a garden. It cannot flourish all year round, and the weeds will always force their way through the cracks eventually, but it still brings joy or meaning to people’s lives.

When we show up online, we give others permission to do the same, to be vulnerable in some way. We give them a space to be themselves or to speak openly about their experiences. Ultimately, negativity is always going to be a thing on social media (and in life). When we choose to share even a tiny part of ourselves with the world, we are inadvertently inviting other people to comment on it, and not all of those comments will be in good faith. Is it worth it?

The haters are always going to hate, but that’s OK, because the players will play whether you like it or not. IMHO, we can’t let negativity stop us from sharing what we have to say with the world. Plus, you can always hire a social media manager like me to deal with it for you 😘

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Are you unsure about being on social media? Maybe you’ve given up Instagram and moved over to Substack - what has that transition been like for you? Tell me about it in the comments! 👇

Thanks so much for reading, I really appreciate it.

Lauren x