Loser Behavior

Or, let me just be a hater for yet another many seconds, okay?

Hi so this a true five things! For a refresher on what that is (and what I originally started this Substack to be) you can click here.

Okay time to clock in and be a bit of a bitch because we all deserve to in these unprecedented times. To the hater-zone we go!!

---

Food & Wine

1. First off, let’s define “loser” and subsequent “loser behavior.”
   
   I’ve recently decided that one of the most cutting insults you could possibly say to a person is simply to call them a “loser” or describe something they did and/or engaged in as “loser behavior.” A strong second place goes to something my best friend said in a voice memo in which she called someone “such a disappointment.” Fucking OUCH. Anyway. You may be reading this and say to yourself, “Woah this is maybe a little harsh, don’t you think?” Which honestly? In a lot of cases? No, no I don’t!
   
   Similarly to the rise of the clean girl aesthetic, I think there’s been a rise in this idea that everyone needs to be on their nice girl shit all of the time. Maybe it’s because everyone has a phone and a TikTok account (guilty, your honor) and people are very quick to turn private moments into content fodder (more on that later), but the Big Brother mentality of 2023 and beyond has made everyone perpetually walk on egg shells. I do not think this is good. I think being able to call shit out is important. A special skill, you could even say.
   
   I’ve been thinking a lot lately about directness and being judgmental and when and where being an unapologetic hater is okay. So this isn’t to say I think you should put on your bitch hat whenever you feel so inclined and just let it rip any time you’re annoyed. Recognizing time, place, and audience is absolutely a skill—a very necessary one (again, more on this later). Especially when you’re about to do something like, oh I don’t know, call someone else a loser lol.
   
   While “loser behavior” is an umbrella term, subjective to a certain degree, I think you absolutely know it when you see it. Immediately dogging on someone’s looks? Loser behavior. Talking endlessly about someone behind their back instead of finding a shred of vertebrae and taking it to their face? Loser behavior. Making fun of something someone is clearly enjoying? Loser behavior. Twisting situations because you can’t stand that you might not be perfect in the retell? Loser behavior. Or honestly, as one of my friends put it when I asked her for her input on this, “Sometimes it’s really just about the vibes.” One can always tell when the vibes are just giving loser.
   
   Have we all had our loser moments? Without question. None of us are immune or infallible and we have all done or said or both-ed things that we now look back on and roll our eyes at past us. But part of being able to accurately pinpoint loserdom and correctly call it out (when it’s appropriate!!) is part of avoiding falling victim to it in the future.
   
   So without further ado, some loser shit I’ve hated recently.
   

2. Sooo sorry but you’re not interesting because you have a bad dating story.
   
   A few months ago a dating story took over lesbian Tiktok and everyone (including myself) had opinions.
   
   The gist was pretty cut and dry.
   
   Girl A meets Girl B online. They both talk for about a week before agreeing to meet up. Girl B agrees to drive ~10 hours to Girl A to spend the weekend together. They are (duh) already seeing red flags in each other and picking fights before the weekend even starts so as to be expected to anyone who doesn’t have two smiskis throwing a paper airplane back and forth as braincells could deduce, the weekend that neither of them had the spine to cancel on goes ~*terribly.*~ Girl A then goes online and makes a TikTok detailing her many, many grievances from said weekend. Girl B sees it and responds with her own. They go viral. And so on and so forth. Lather, rinse, repeat.
   
   I don’t want to take up too much airspace dissecting where these two full ass adults went wrong. That’s…again obvious to literally anyone. I would hope so, anyway.
   
   What I do want to take up some room pontificating about is the fact that we’re so trained these days to think that anything less than desirable that happens to us is not only interesting but is also worthy of bringing to the court of public opinion. Someone being rude to you in line at the coffee shop is not revolutionary. Having a tense conversation with a coworker is almost never that ground breaking. Going on a bad date is like, a pretty universal experience.
   
   I recognize that even to a tiny degree I have been at times responsible for how we’ve gotten to this mindset. The confessional blog boom of the late twenty-teens fully encouraged milking every possible discomfort a person could feel for internet entertainment. So I get it! This thing happened and it made me feel some type of way so isn’t that interesting!!!!
   
   But no. It’s not interesting. It’s immature. And reactive and reductive and annoying. Do I understand why it takes off? Sure. Does that make it any less immature, reactive, and reductive in my opinion? Sure doesn’t!
   
   Listen as someone who equates complaining to nailing a crossword on a list of my favorite things to do, I could not get it more! I love to get on the phone with my best friend and do laps around the house for 2+ hours continuously beating a dead horse. But that is indisputably different than bringing your grievances to the internet for validation from people you would and will never meet. At that point, what is the goal? What’s your point?
   
   Every annoyance, every weird instance, every bad date? It’s not everyone’s business.
   
   I think we all could do better with being a skoch more private, and a tad more discerning with what we think everyone must know.
   

3. Similarly, I think we need to bring back not always “being yourself.”
   
   This is a tricky one.
   
   On one hand, I think originality and self-acceptance is huge and has done so much for us. I think it’s really cool that people feel more comfortable with expressing themselves and not automatically assimilating to whatever everyone else around them is doing. I have learned so much and become (I hope) a better person by surrounding myself with people who are different than me.
   
   Hoooowwwweeevvveeerrrrr….
   
   There’s something else I’ve started to notice in the Age of Originality™ where people have decided their self-expression trumps the responsibility of knowing how to read a room. Where the “well that’s just me” overrides the comfort of anyone else around you. Where the “what feels good” and the “what I personally like” is really all that matters. Where self-entitlement is king and everything else is secondary.
   
   Recently, influencer Jake Shane got a fair amount of pushback for how he handled being on the red carpet at the Vanity Fair Oscar’s Party. Most notably, the interaction between himself and Julia Fox regarding the daughter in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You stood out. While Julia was speaking to the what the film meant to her as a woman and a mother (for anyone unfamiliar, the movie centers around a mom who is struggling to manage her life and her daughter’s feeding disorder), Jake Shane repeatedly was stuck on “how fucking annoying” the character of the daughter is in the movie. This did spark the ever-present debate about whether or not influencers “belong” on red carpets, but I saw something else entirely.
   
   Fans of Jake Shane were quick to point out that this is his personality. This is his style of humor. This is what he does. This is who he is. And if you don’t get it, you just don’t get it, you don’t get the joke, you don’t get him.
   
   This might be true! But what I think is more likely is some combination of things. That very well might be who Jake Shane is, his true self. And his true self also utterly failed at social awareness and reading the fucking room, to match his parlance.
   
   I hate to say this because it is indisputably an Old Person™ thing to say, but I do think this is in part generational. As millennials we accepted the ball pits and free beer on tap and the no dress codes at the office…and then we were like “oh but actually I would prefer a 401k and dental and this isn’t really that cute anymore.” Gen Z isn’t at the 401k and dental yet; they’re still more concerned with being able to say “cunt” whenever they want because it’s who they are and time and place be damned.

   

   I think we need to bring back masking, to a certain extent lol. You are not the same person at work as you are when you go out with your friends and talk shit with first and last names. You are not the same person to someone you just met as you are when you’re with your partner at the end of a long week. You are not the same person on a red carpet discussing an intentionally heartbreaking film with Julia Fox as you are when you’re hehe haha-ing on your own (to use his parlance again) fucking podcast. And you SHOULD NOT BE. Is compartmentalizing a trauma response? Sure, fine. But it’s also a skill and a necessary one at that.
   
   Bring back not always standing ten toes down on “this is who I am!!!” Because, honestly? Sometimes? Who you are has the potential to be pretty (one more for the road) fucking embarrassing.
   
   …I can admit I got a little Republican there. My bad.
   

4. Always and forever: Fuck AI.
   
   I have so many thoughts about Mia Ballard.
   
   I don’t know what happened with Mia or Shy Girl. I don’t know if the novel was bad because it was simply bad or if it was bad because of ChatGPT or whatever was used. I don’t know if Mia is a villain because she’s a liar or if she is a victim of her own oversight. None of us do, and we likely never will.
   
   What I do know is that this is setting a precedent that I am…really wary of.
   
   It should not be lost on people that Mia, who is young, a woman, and Black, is being crucified for something James Frey did and the result is he made Book of the Month. It should not be lost on people that this book should have been vetted, and somehow the publisher is basically putting their hands in the air and being like, “not on us!!!!” And it shouldn’t be lost on people that AI being so readily accessible is what got us here to begin with.
   
   Make no mistake: I am not saying we should paint Mia Ballard as innocent. But I am saying that the fact that this was so easily possible in the first place should be raising the alarm bells.
   
   It honestly really pisses me off.
   
   I think this is about to become the new plagiarism accusation and people aren’t taking it seriously enough. It’s also making us…dumb. Which is a huge fear of mine so why aren’t people taking that more seriously too?! I see too many people asking Claude how to draw something (which like..what?) and Grok who owns a video (maybe check the logo you can see??) and Chat how to write an RSVP (idk how did you do it for your entire life beforehand my good god). It feels like yelling underwater. I hate it.
   
   I’m scared of and turned off by the idea of “human made” becoming a commodity.
   
   I want people to get back to being comfortable with the idea of being bad at things and floundering and failing and trying again anyway. I want to be okay with things taking time. I want to be able to look at two logo designs for the same company and be able to tell which designer made which one because they have their own visions and so on and so forth. I want the imperfections, I want the try. I’m over the immediacy and the the code of it all.
   
   If your novel is bad I don’t think that means you should feel like AI could potentially make it better. That is beyond depressing.
   
   I know I said we were going to the hater-zone but I don’t want to be so “glass half empty” about this. I am regularly discouraged by how I see others be so ~whatevs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯~ about AI—make no mistake. But I am encouraged by how I see people respond about imperfect art, by human made things. We still want the fanfics, the novels that have typos, the hand-knit things from farmer’s markets, the art with visible brush strokes, the one and only even if it could be better. It is still there.
   
   That being said. I don’t think Mia Ballard is the end of this in publishing whatsoever. I have a feeling I will be yelling about this for a while. I hope I’m wrong.
   

5. And last but not least: If you’re going to be unhinged, lean in or don’t do it all.
   
   There are a lot of things I can’t get on board with when it comes to human behavior.
   
   Some bigger than others, of course.
   
   My distaste for not putting the toilet seat down is nowhere near to the same as how off-putting I find being a liar as a human trait. Sure, I find it grating when people pronounce it “ex-presso” instead of, you know, how it’s spelled. But that’s not even in the same category as how I feel when I find out someone tips below 15%. Learning that someone makes Kranch (shoutout to my gf) for their fries and they’re being fully genuine about it is not at all the same as learning that they didn’t vote and that doesn’t bother them in the slightest.
   
   All of this to say, I’m judgmental. And I’m not shy about it!
   
   But one of the biggest things I cannot get on board with that I have recently been on the receiving end of is observing someone do something that is objectively insane, only to then also watch them immediately retract it and walk it back.
   
   Babes, darling, sweet summer child. If you’re gonna be unhinged, you gotta do that shit with your whole chest.
   
   It’s not this deep, but it’s not totally dissimilar to avoiding accountability—ironically something else I cannot get behind. We all slip sometimes. We’ve all sent a text we shouldn’t, made a face we should have held back, showed up as less than our best. But part of the “losing it” is not letting it get away from you. And part of the latter, is owning it. The ownership is the whole damn thing.
   
   So if you’re gonna send the text, react on social media, do the drive by, raise the brow, snap, crackle, pop, you have to own it. You have to, I’m sorry! If you try to walk it back or pretend like it never happened? I’m sorry x2 but that is so pathetic. P A T H E T I C. There’s truly no bigger secondhand embarrassment than seeing someone do something crazy and only to watch them realize after the fact that it was crazy and then try to pretend it’s not their fault that the crazy crayz-ed in the first place.
   
   Whole chest or nothing, those are your options.
   
   Thank you and goodnight. It’s been real from my hater-zone.