How Some People Became So Averse to Hype
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The more popular something gets, the less appealing it can start to feel. Take The Pitt: Suddenly, everyone’s watching it and everyone’s talking about it. At a certain point, the excitement starts to make you feel like you should be into it—and just like that, you don’t want to watch it anymore.
Anna Holmes calls this feeling “hype aversion”—not quite contrarianism, but a reflex against being told what to like, even indirectly. Popularity, after all, doesn’t just signal quality. It can also feel like pressure. When something is everywhere, opting out can start to feel like a way to hold on to your independence—to make sure your taste is still your own. What looks like lack of interest, Holmes suggests, may actually be something more deliberate: not rejecting culture, but resisting the “overidentification” with it.
So when you skip the show everyone loves, are you following your own instincts, or pushing back against the hype?
On Resisting the Hype
The People Who Shun Super-Popular Pop Culture
By Anna Holmes
The Pitt, Severance, Sinners, you name it: For some reason, the more hype something gets, the more likely I am to resist it.
Why Does Watching TV Feel Like Homework? (Just Me?)
By Shirley Li
Binge-watching has become a way of life, for better or worse.
Your FOMO Is Trying to Tell You Something
By Faith Hill
Maybe you are missing out. (From 2025)
Still Curious?
- Is this the worst-ever era of American pop culture? An emerging critical consensus argues that we’ve entered a cultural dark age. “I’m not so sure,” Spencer Kornhaber wrote last year.
- Why you can’t stop streaming Seinfeld. Or Frasier. Or Bones. In 2020, Sophie Gilbert wrote about the psychology of comfort TV.
Other Diversions
- It’s not gambling, it’s “girl math”
- An astonishing concept album made even better
- Why doesn’t anybody realize we’re going back to the moon?
PS
My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “I saw this on a cross-country bicycle trip in 2024. I was struck by the juxtaposition of the past and future right there on the side of the road. I might not have even noticed it if I had zoomed by in a car,” David C. writes.
We’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
— Rafaela