The era of hate-watching

We jumped in front of the content train, and invented the term hate watch' all to appease our own critic. But if it brings you joy, why feel ashamed of it?

-  Zarah

We live in the golden age of television. TV is not just on our, well, TVs, but also on our laptops. Our phones. Our tablets. Even my projector is 'smart'. We can consume content in different screen ratios, in different languages, and watch at the speed we prefer. We can download it and keep it for years, we can share our screens from across the world, we can watch something on the big screen while keeping one eye trained carefully on our smaller screen.

And yet somehow, amidst all this, we have the time and ability to 'hate watch'.

Hate watching is when we watch something for the purpose of mocking it.

But is it?

When I was growing up, a common get-to-know-you question was, 'What is your guilty pleasure?' At age seven, it confused me because if something brings you joy, why does it also come with guilt? Decades later, it still does confuse me, but I think I have some answers for it.

At the end of the day, we are social creatures and we abide in our society by law. Law predicates our actions and behaviour. But not all law is written in a book. Some laws are unspoken, developed over time, and you just gotta know them.

Laws like watch 'meaningful' movies. Read 'good' books. Have 'deep' discussions. Eat 'healthy'.

Since we are meant to follow these laws, automatically it presumes that everything and anything that we do outside of these become 'cringe'.