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January 2020  
  
 _(I originally intended this for startup founders, who are often surprised by
the attention they get as their companies grow, but it applies equally to
anyone who becomes famous.)_  
  
If you become sufficiently famous, you'll acquire some fans who like you too
much. These people are sometimes called "fanboys," and though I dislike that
term, I'm going to have to use it here. We need some word for them, because
this is a distinct phenomenon from someone simply liking your work.  
  
A fanboy is obsessive and uncritical. Liking you becomes part of their
identity, and they create an image of you in their own head that is much
better than reality. Everything you do is good, because you do it. If you do
something bad, they find a way to see it as good. And their love for you is
not, usually, a quiet, private one. They want everyone to know how great you
are.  
  
Well, you may be thinking, I could do without this kind of obsessive fan, but
I know there are all kinds of people in the world, and if this is the worst
consequence of fame, that's not so bad.  
  
Unfortunately this is not the worst consequence of fame. As well as fanboys,
you'll have haters.  
  
A hater is obsessive and uncritical. Disliking you becomes part of their
identity, and they create an image of you in their own head that is much worse
than reality. Everything you do is bad, because you do it. If you do something
good, they find a way to see it as bad. And their dislike for you is not,
usually, a quiet, private one. They want everyone to know how awful you are.  
  
If you're thinking of checking, I'll save you the trouble. The second and
fifth paragraphs are identical except for "good" being switched to "bad" and
so on.  
  
I spent years puzzling about haters. What are they, and where do they come
from? Then one day it dawned on me. Haters are just fanboys with the sign
switched.  
  
Note that by haters, I don't simply mean trolls. I'm not talking about people
who say bad things about you and then move on. I'm talking about the much
smaller group of people for whom this becomes a kind of obsession and who do
it repeatedly over a long period.  
  
Like fans, haters seem to be an automatic consequence of fame. Anyone
sufficiently famous will have them. And like fans, haters are energized by the
fame of whoever they hate. They hear a song by some pop singer. They don't
like it much. If the singer were an obscure one, they'd just forget about it.
But instead they keep hearing her name, and this seems to drive some people
crazy. Everyone's always going on about this singer, but she's no good! She's
a fraud!  
  
That word "fraud" is an important one. It's the spectral signature of a hater
to regard the object of their hatred as a _fraud_. They can't deny their fame.
Indeed, their fame is if anything exaggerated in the hater's mind. They notice
every mention of the singer's name, because every mention makes them angrier.
In their own minds they exaggerate both the singer's fame and her lack of
talent, and the only way to reconcile those two ideas is to conclude that she
has tricked everyone.  
  
What sort of people become haters? Can anyone become one? I'm not sure about
this, but I've noticed some patterns. Haters are generally losers in a very
specific sense: although they are occasionally talented, they have never
achieved much. And indeed, anyone successful enough to have achieved
significant fame would be unlikely to regard another famous person as a fraud
on that account, because anyone famous knows how random fame is.  
  
But haters are not always complete losers. They are not always the proverbial
guy living in his mom's basement. Many are, but some have some amount of
talent. In fact I suspect that a sense of frustrated talent is what drives
some people to become haters. They're not just saying "It's unfair that so-
and-so is famous," but "It's unfair that so-and-so is famous, and not me."  
  
Could a hater be cured if they achieved something impressive? My guess is
that's a moot point, because they _never will_. I've been able to observe for
long enough that I'm fairly confident the pattern works both ways: not only do
people who do great work never become haters, haters never do great work.
Although I dislike the word "fanboy," it's evocative of something important
about both haters and fanboys. It implies that the fanboy is so slavishly
predictable in his admiration that he's diminished as a result, that he's less
than a man.  
  
Haters seem even more diminished. I can imagine being a fanboy. I can think of
people whose work I admire so much that I could abase myself before them out
of sheer gratitude. If P. G. Wodehouse were still alive, I could see myself
being a Wodehouse fanboy. But I could not imagine being a hater.  
  
Knowing that haters are just fanboys with the sign bit flipped makes it much
easier to deal with them. We don't need a separate theory of haters. We can
just use existing techniques for dealing with obsessive fans.  
  
The most important of which is simply not to think much about them. If you're
like most people who become famous enough to acquire haters, your initial
reaction will be one of mystification. Why does this guy seem to have it in
for me? Where does his obsessive energy come from, and what makes him so
appallingly nasty? What did I do to set him off? Is it something I can fix?  
  
The mistake here is to think of the hater as someone you have a dispute with.
When you have a dispute with someone, it's usually a good idea to try to
understand why they're upset and then fix things if you can. Disputes are
distracting. But it's a false analogy to think of a hater as someone you have
a dispute with. It's an understandable mistake, if you've never encountered
haters before. But when you realize that you're dealing with a hater, and what
a hater is, it's clear that it's a waste of time even to think about them. If
you have obsessive fans, do you spend any time wondering what makes them love
you so much? No, you just think "some people are kind of crazy," and that's
the end of it.  
  
Since haters are equivalent to fanboys, that's the way to deal with them too.
There may have been something that set them off. But it's not something that
would have set off a normal person, so there's no reason to spend any time
thinking about it. It's not you, it's them.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**