Does negative energy come back to you? Yes, and the mechanism is simpler than a curse. What you spend your attention on is what you practice, and someone who practices contempt for strangers is building the exact mood they then have to live inside. You can’t run cruelty out one side of your life and expect good things to arrive at the other.
What I was doing when this hit me
I’m 48 and I watch Love Island. You can make fun of me for that. I’ll allow it.
I love a dating show. It’s low stakes, I don’t have to use my brain, and nothing on it spikes my adrenaline, which is the entire job I need television to do at the end of a day. It melts the day off me. That’s also why it’s one of the few things I let in when I’m winding down, which is a whole other post about protecting your peace.
Then I put on the Season 8 reunion and it stopped being background noise.
What the Love Island cast said about the abuse they got
KC Chandler said he’d been getting death threats and racial slurs. So had his family. Tierra Davis, who everyone calls Titi, talked about what the backlash had done to her too. KC had stepped almost entirely away from social media because of it, and he said on stage that he doesn’t stand for racism toward him, toward Titi, or toward any of the other cast members.
What set it off, as far as the audience was concerned, was that he and Titi came back from Casa Amor together. That ended his relationship with Aniya. People decided they were the villains of the season.
That’s the whole offense. A choice on a dating show, on an island, in Fiji.
Why this fired me up
What is your life like that you have to say such horrible things to people you don’t even know, who were on a TV show?
Not people who hurt you. Not people you’ve ever met. People you watched on a screen for a few weeks, who made a choice inside a game they signed up to play.
There’s a bias in how I see this. I’m old enough to look at these young people as kids. They’re not. I know they’re not, and I know they signed up to be in the public eye and everything that comes with that. I still feel for them. That part doesn’t cancel out just because it isn’t logical.
Is it bots or real people?
I don’t know, and I’m not going to pretend I do. Some of it is automated, some accounts exist to stir things up, and none of us can sort one from the other from the outside.
What I believe is that it’s mostly real people. Real accounts, run by someone with a job and a kitchen and a group chat, typing a thing to a stranger they’d never say to a face. That’s the version worth thinking about, because a bot doesn’t have a life for any of this to come back to. A person does.
How does negative energy affect manifesting?
I’ve written before about manifesting as energy plus action, and the short version is that you hold the feeling of the thing you want and then you go plant something toward it.
What that post doesn’t say is that the energy doesn’t switch off when you close your vision board and open a comment section. It’s the same person, the same day, the same nervous system. You can’t spend twenty minutes deciding who you’re becoming and then spend an hour being someone who tells a stranger to die, and expect only the first one to count.
Like attracts like describes what happens when you spend your hours a certain way. Someone marinating in contempt gets good at contempt, and then that’s the lens on everything: their friendships, their job, their own reflection.
The version of this that’s closer to home
Sure, I’ve judged people on TV. Someone does something on screen and a thought goes off in my head about it.
The difference is what happens next. Mine is a bubble thought. It pops and I move on. I’m not picking up my phone, looking up that person’s social media and blasting them for it, because that sounds ridiculous and embarrassing. If I ever comment on a public figure’s post it’s something positive. The rest stays where it started.
Having the thought costs nobody anything. Making the trip from the thought to the keyboard is a decision, and it gets easier every time it’s made.
There are smaller shapes of that trip and they’re easy to miss, because they’re socially fine. A pile-on that gets one more line added to it. A comment about a stranger’s body or house or parenting. A subtweet aimed at someone who’ll recognize themselves. A group chat where tearing someone apart is the entertainment.
None of that ends a life. It’s still practice, and the mood it leaves behind doesn’t stay in the app.
And I have a past. Good grief, if I’d been on a show like that in my twenties I would have gotten all the hate. All of it. I grew up. These people will grow too, and that’s worth holding onto while you’re watching someone have their worst week in public.
Today’s action
No self-flagellation required. Three small things.
- Catch one moment today where you’re about to add something cutting about a person you don’t know, in a comment, a chat, or out loud. Notice it, then don’t.
- Send one genuinely nice thing to someone who can’t do anything for you. A creator whose stuff you like, a stranger who did a good job, a friend you haven’t told lately. My family hands out acts of kindness cards for exactly this.
- If a feed keeps putting you in that mood, ration it the way you’d ration any other thing that drains you.
Frequently asked questions
Is what goes around comes around true?
Yes, though the mechanism is ordinary rather than magical. What you practice is what you get good at, and someone who spends hours in contempt is training themselves into a mood that then colors their relationships, their work and their own head. You don’t need the universe to keep a ledger for that to be true.
Why do people troll strangers online?
Usually because it’s cheap and there’s no face in front of them. A screen removes the small human signals that stop you being cruel in person, and a pile-on adds the feeling of a crowd agreeing with you. I can’t tell you what’s going on in any individual’s life, and I’d be guessing if I tried.
Are online trolls bots or real people?
Both, and there’s no reliable way to tell from the outside. Automated accounts exist and they do amplify pile-ons. I think it’s mostly real people with real lives, which is why the cost of it is worth thinking about at all.
Does being negative online affect your own life?
It affects your mood first, and your mood is what you make every other decision from. The hour you spend being cruel to a stranger is an hour of practice at being that person, and it doesn’t stay neatly inside the app. That’s the part that gets skipped when people call it harmless.
What should I do when I see a pile-on happening?
Don’t add to it, and don’t quote it to be outraged about it either, because that spreads it further. If you have something kind to say to the person on the receiving end, say it directly. Then close the tab. Rationing what you let in is a real skill and it applies here.
Is it bad to enjoy reality TV drama?
No. Watching a dating show and wanting a couple to work out is a normal, harmless way to wind down, and I’m not giving mine up. The show is fine. The question is whether the people on it stop being people to you once the episode ends.
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Related reading
- How to Manifest the Grounded Way (Energy Plus Action)
- Protect Your Peace Without Putting Your Head in the Sand
- Affirmations Work Better When You Stop Chasing
So if you’re trying to grow something good, the seeds you plant in other people’s lives are part of the same garden. You don’t get to sow one thing and harvest another. Go be decent to a stranger today, and let that be the seed.
