nobody ever lost an argument by being unimpressed
in defense of liking things, against the people who've made that embarrassing
There’s a Lucid owners forum I read more than I should. People who paid six figures for a car, talking about it every day. You start to notice something.
Someone says the car is good, and the replies arrive to explain why they’re naive, shilling, or in denial.
Someone says the car is broken, or half-baked, or overhyped, and nobody asks for evidence. They just nod.
Because of course, that guy gets it.
But this doesn’t just stop at cars. Somewhere along the way, being unimpressed started working like a backstage lanyard at a concert…wear it and nobody checks what you actually know. (Insert the Wayne’s World backstage pass scene here)
Like something and you’ve got to prove you’re not stupid. Hate it and you’re already smart.
guilty until proven sincere
You can’t just say you liked a thing. You have to wrap up your liking in a flak jacket. “I know I’ll get hammered for this, but I actually really enjoyed…”
Or the preemptive concession: “It’s not perfect, obviously, but…”
Here’s mine, and I’ll do it again before this essay is over: “Look, obviously plenty of complaints are completely fair, and I’m not saying…”
Utterly armored up. Before I’d worked out what I was even arguing. That sentence apologizes for the sheer crime of enjoyment and then runs out of room before it gets to the part where I say what I liked.
It’s a genre now. You’ve read this one already:
“Been saying this for two years. Anyone still defending them at this point is either a shill or hasn’t actually driven one. Enjoy your beta.”
3 sentences, no evidence, and naturally, 40+ upvotes. It leaves a wake you can see from shore. When did “honestly, I kind of like it” ever do that?
What do you mean, you like it? Obviously, you’re bought, or brainwashed, or coping. Or you just didn’t look hard enough, and anyone with their eyes open would’ve been disappointed too.
And it works, because marketing got there first. We’ve been sold to so relentlessly that we’ve grown an immune response, and anything positive now sounds like it wants something from you.
The sour one doesn’t look like he’s selling anything. Online marketers noticed that years ago and built a whole industry on it, which is its own essay and not this one. He sounds like he’s paying attention instead, and trusting nothing looks like rigor. You don’t need me to convince you. You already know at least 5 YouTubers in your hobby of choice who post more negativity than positivity and have racked up hundreds of thousands of views for it.
You can’t lose this game if you play it right. Say a thing is good and one flaw beats you. Somebody links a bug report and now you’re the shmuck who didn’t check. Say it’s overrated and there’s nothing anybody can bring, because you haven’t made a claim about the thing at all. You’ve made one about everybody who likes it, and somehow we never need to fact-check that.
the second hobby
The stupid takeaway here would be one where the moral is “criticism bad, positivity good.” Which is why I’m not making that take.
There’s plenty of fake positivity: brand loyalty that’s bordering on being a personality, fanboys who’ll defend a buggy launch with their lives, people who confuse owning a thing with the thing being good. There are a million arguments for why that happens and not one of them changes the fact that companies really do take your money and hand you a beta. Some complaints are simply correct.
But in the communities I used to spend time in, the complaining feels like it’s long outlived whatever it was diagnosing. Before Destiny 2 shut down I’d check in on it now and then. Every time, somebody had posted an enormous essay about being finally, permanently done with the game because it’s just so terrible even though they’ve racked up five thousand hours of playtime, without even the slightest ounce of self-awareness.
And I’m sure there’s some whiny contrarian ready to tell me they’re entitled to their opinion, and that their opinion carries weight precisely because they have so much experience.
Bull. Shit.
Five thousand hours in, still angry enough to write a novel about it, and you think anyone is going to find value in that? All you’re in for is a gigantic novel about how the game is systematically terrible in every single way, with judgments aimed at the next 5 generations of the developers’ children over the betrayal of the latest attempt at balancing the loot drip game for an audience of compulsive gamblers who don’t even realize they’re gambling.
Yes, I realize I’m now comparing a $60 game with a $100,000 car. Different stakes, same faces, same tone.
You can write 10,000 words about what’s wrong with something. Try writing 10,000 about what’s right. You’ll run dry by word 300, because “it works and I liked it” doesn’t have 10,000 words in it and you know as you write it, you’re already mentally preparing yourself for the assault on every point you’re making, so you’re trying to preemptively come up with defenses for it.
I think there is an unhealthy temptation in playing the critic. You become one of the people who sees clearly, which is nice work if you can get it. You’re not alone in it either, because miserable people find each other a lot faster than happy ones do (something that explains the rise of the Joe Rogan manosphere, but I suppose that’s a different article altogether). And I think mostly it’s status. Disappointment reads as taste, whereas liking things reads like you’ll eat whatever they put in front of you, you bootlicking twit.
So you get an arms race where being hard to please is some kind of…flex, I guess? The most miserable person in the thread is the most respected one, and the guy who still likes the thing is a little embarrassing.
Except there’s a major cost to this over time. If complaining is free, complaints stop carrying actual information. I have read that Lucid forum for almost 4 years, ever since I bought my Lucid Air, and I could not tell you, based solely on that forum, whether the car is good.
Everything is broken.
Everyone is furious.
I think a lot of people don’t know how to enjoy something for what it is anymore. They’re better at cataloguing what it isn’t. Hand them something and they’ll tell you about the corners that got cut, and the version that only ever existed in their head. That muscle is enormous and gets a hardcore workout every day.
the year-long grudge
So…where’s the line?
I’m not telling you to shut up and be grateful. (Told you I’d do it again.) Honest feedback is one of the few good things the internet still does, the guy who actually owns the car telling you about the rattle the reviewer never had time to find. And plenty of these products genuinely got worse: shipped broken, paywalled, rotted in place while the price climbed.
Except…that’s become an alibi.
Which is roughly where somebody starts typing at me:
“So Harsha, things got measurably worse and your take is that the people who noticed have a personality problem. Companies would love this essay. Make complaining embarrassing enough and people just stop.”
Fine.
What I’ve got for you is that a thread full of real grievances is the best place to hide a fake one. The recreational cynic stands in the middle of that crowd and the crowd waves him through, because he’s saying what they’re saying (again, Wayne’s World and backstage passes).
Real criticism wants it better, or wants you to know what you’re buying. A real complaint has a finish line. Somebody actually establishes the problem or it gets fixed, and the thing is over. But a performative complaint never reaches a conclusion.
There’s also no cheap way back. Say the thing is garbage in front of two hundred people, then watch them patch it. Nobody posts “they fixed it.” You’d have to walk back a year of your own comments to get there, so the complaint just ends up outliving the problem, on its own. I’ve seen threads still furious about bugs that shipped fixes months earlier. Nobody in them is lying. They simply stopped checking a long time ago and nothing has come along to make them look again.
The same goes for the superfans, who are playing to a room exactly like the cynic is. Nothing about the cheering ever resolves either. It’s better mannered and better company, and it costs them something the cynic never pays: the superfan is the one who gets called embarrassing.
You can spend a year angry at a game you played for 50 hours.
You can get more out of hating something than you ever got out of having it.
At some point the object stops being what the disappointment is about. It’s just the occasion, and the disappointment turns out to be the thing you actually wanted. So next time you’re three replies deep into why something’s overrated, ask whether anything you’ve been angry about this year has ever just concluded.
Anyways, I like the car.