Why Do I Hate People So Much? A Field Guide to Everyday Irritations

You don’t actually hate people. You hate what people do, all day long, in public, often loudly. There’s a difference, and it matters, because one is a personality flaw and the other is a reasonable response to the person on speakerphone in the pharmacy line.

If you’ve caught yourself typing “why do I hate people so much” into a search bar, you’re in good company. Here’s a field guide to what’s getting to you, and why.

The usual suspects

1. Speakerphone in public

Nobody needs to hear both halves of your call about your cousin’s gallbladder. The phone has a speaker for your ear. It’s right there.

2. The top-of-the-escalator stop

They step off, stop dead and look around as if they’ve just arrived on a new planet, while a conveyor belt of people keeps arriving behind them.

3. Reply-all

Two hundred people did not need to know that you “will be there!” Neither did the forty people who replied-all asking everyone to stop replying all.

4. Ordering at the counter as a surprise

They waited in line for eleven minutes and are only now looking at the menu, which has been on the wall since 2004.

5. Loud chewing

This one has an actual name: misophonia, a strong reaction to specific sounds like chewing, slurping and breathing. If certain mouth noises make you feel like flipping a table, it isn’t just you, and you aren’t a bad person. Your brain filed those sounds under “threat.”

6. The 6 a.m. group chat

Fourteen notifications before your alarm, and all of them are about a barbecue in three weeks.

7. “Quick call?”

It’s never quick, and it’s never a call that needed to happen. It could have been one sentence in a text.

8. The cart left in the parking space

The cart return is thirty feet away. That’s the purest test of character society has, and a lot of people fail it.

9. People who explain your job to you

Especially when they learned about it from a video this morning.

10. The recline, the armrest and the plane

Some people treat a middle seat like a negotiation. Some treat it like a conquest.

So why does it get worse with age?

“The older I get, the more I hate people” is practically a genre at this point, and there are a few honest reasons behind it:

• Your social battery has a smaller capacity. After years of work, family and obligations, there’s less left over for strangers. Introverts feel this first, and most strongly.
• You’ve seen the reruns. At twenty, the escalator guy is new. At forty, he’s the ten-thousandth episode.
• Your time got more expensive. When your free hours are scarce, everyone who wastes them feels like a thief.
• Burnout looks like misanthropy. When you’re exhausted, everyone gets on your nerves. If it isn’t just irritation and it feels heavy all the time, that’s worth taking seriously and talking to someone about.

What actually helps

• Find your people. Most “I hate people” feelings are really “I’m around the wrong people too much.” Fewer, better people fixes a lot.
• Budget your social battery. Say no to the thing you’d resent. Leave the party when you’re done, not two hours later.
• Use the opossum strategy. When in doubt, play dead. It works for opossums, and it works for group chats.
• Say it with your clothes. Wear the message, and you won’t have to say it out loud nearly as often.

On that last point, we can help. There’s the Playing Dead to Avoid You possum shirt for introverts. Powered by Cold Brew & Contempt is for mornings. Front Row Seat to the Shit Show is for the office. And To Whom It May Concern, Sincerely Everybody covers everything else.

And when words fail completely, there’s always the middle finger. People have been relying on it since ancient Athens.