Why I Can’t Stand the Hype

These days, everyone seems to be watching The Pitt—but not me. I hear it’s really good. I have to believe it’s good, in fact, because people in my social circle—and Emmy Award voters—won’t stop saying it’s really good. “I’m riveted,” one friend said. “It’s addictive,” another said. “I’m surprised you haven’t seen it,” yet another said. But honestly, the more people who recommend the show, the less likely I am to watch it.

I’ve been this way for a while now. It was the same back in the early aughts, with The Wire, and in the later aughts, with Breaking Bad. Though eventually I succumbed and watched both shows—and loved them enough to rewatch them years later—my unwillingness to engage with literally popular culture in the moment that it’s popular seems only to have intensified in the ensuing years.

“But have you seen Severance?” you might ask. No. Slow Horses? The Night Manager? No and no. I also haven’t seen Sinners—even though I love a period piece and a good fright, and everybody I know is obsessed with it.

This tendency is something I’ve come to call “hype aversion”: an avoidance of the pop-culture products that seemingly everyone insists I would like. It’s not that I’m somehow above it all or too cool (I don’t consider myself cool at all). Some people are early adopters; others are late adopters. I’m simply a weirdly resistant one.

Does this make me a jerk? I don’t like to think so. Contrarian doesn’t quite describe me; my rejection of The Pitt isn’t an attempt to appear provocative or argumentative. And nonconformist doesn’t work; it suggests a person allergic to the zeitgeist, which I’m not. (After all, I covet Clare V. bags. I own a pair of Stan Smith Adidas.) I’m also not a dissenter. Dissent suggests a protest against something that a person has previous experience with, or doesn’t believe in; but my pop-culture resistance is different from having seen something and deemed it wanting or boring. I’m not necessarily worried about encountering pop culture that turns out to be bad. I just don’t care to act on it if it’s supposed to be good.

[From the June 2025 issue: Is this the worst-ever era of American pop culture?]

I’m not alone in this. (As a matter of fact, the impetus for this inquiry was an unscheduled conversation between me and one of my Atlantic editors, with whom I bonded over a reluctance to watch The Pitt.) Roland Imhoff, a social psychologist at the Psychological Institute of Gutenberg University, in Germany, told me that he relates as well, and suggested that what I’m expressing is less a need for uniqueness than a form of “psychological reactance”—a defensive response that occurs when someone thinks their freedom of choice is being constrained. For a long time, Imhoff told me, he “furiously refused to even touch” the Harry Potter novels because of their popularity and ubiquity; he dug into the series only once his daughter expressed interest in it. The same happened with the music of Taylor Swift: He made an effort to avoid it, then was forced to listen. “And then,” he said, laughing, “I kind of liked it.”

My aversion to hype might seem particularly strange, given that staying on top of popular culture used to be my full-time job. In the mid-’90s, I was an editorial assistant at Entertainment Weekly, a magazine where, among staffers, having an opinion about culture was a primary currency. It was how we came up with ideas, and ideas about how to express those ideas. Our cultural knowledge gave us sway and access. We were the influencers who covered the day’s influencers—actors, writers, directors—and back then, I loved it all.

So what’s my damage now? A few days before my conversation with Imhoff, I reached out to Marilynn Brewer, a social psychologist who, in 1991, articulated what she called “optimal distinctiveness theory,” which proposes that human beings are driven by two (often opposing) psychological impulses: a need for belonging and a need for differentiation. These desires operate in tension, Brewer told me. People look to foster enough in-group behaviors that they feel a sense of social cohesion and belonging, but they also want to express a distinction from others, to avoid a loss of identity or anonymity.

Of course, context matters. The need to belong or feel different fluctuates depending on any number of factors—your job, the town you live in, the friend groups surrounding you. Brewer explained that these needs operate less as fixed personality traits than as something more fluid, such as hunger, which has a threshold that changes over time. When I asked her about my disinterest in widely hyped cultural products, she speculated that these trends might activate my “pretty steep need for differentiation.” And what I have sometimes worried is a sign of immaturity or arbitrary contrariness could be, she suggested, resistance to immersion in a crowd. For some people, Brewer said, excessive hype triggers FOMO (a fear of missing out). Perhaps, I thought later, people like me suffer from LOMO: a love of missing out.

[Read: Your FOMO is trying to tell you something]

Occasionally, I worry that my LOMO might be annoying. For instance, I don’t so much announce my refusal to engage with The Pitt to interested parties as humor them and try to change the subject, which makes me bad at watercooler conversation. And adopting the mantle of cultural curmudgeon can get tiring. If I’ve made a big deal to friends about brushing off their pop-culture recommendations, I then feel a need to keep up an appearance of recalcitrance. Eventually this becomes an expected posture: an orientation and reputation that is difficult to extract myself from. “You’re the sort of person who doesn’t watch TV,” the guy I’m dating says. “Yes, I do!” I say. Then he points out that I don’t even know how to use my smart TV.

In his book Invisible Influence, Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the Wharton School of Business, distinguishes between cultural products such as movies, music, and television, which are commonly used as identity markers, and something like, say, dishwashers or toilet paper, which are what he calls more “functional” domains of life. “Imagine you met someone at a party,” he suggested when we spoke recently, and they asked you, “‘What TV shows do you like?’” You might think, “Well, wait a second, what shows I say may impact what this person thinks about me,” he said, and then you might become cautious about what you pick.

According to Berger, a “magnet” model of social influence pushes some people toward conformity and others away from it. In our conversation, he made a distinction between what he called “bandwagon effects” (conformity) and “snob effects” (avoidance when something is too popular), or a need for uniqueness. These motivations aren’t divergent or mutually exclusive, he said; they can, and do, coexist. “It’s not that people only want to fit or only want to stand out,” he said. “Both are true.”

Perhaps this means that resistance to hype is not snobbery but identity management—a need for differentiation that gets triggered when a person believes their autonomy is under threat. In other words, maybe my rejection of The Pitt has little to do with the cultural product and much more to do with an effort to retain independence. I’m not rejecting culture; I’m rejecting overidentification—which, in a highly individualistic society like the United States, may not be such an odd reaction.

My chat with Brewer turned up something else I hadn’t thought of: that my attitude might be related to the sheer number of cultural products on offer, and to the speed with which these products are analyzed and memed. Perhaps shrugging off culture is a form of self-preservation to those of us who are easily overwhelmed by the way social-media algorithms accelerate consumption, and push individuals to engage in public conversation. When the culture pressures people to show that they’re in the know, some of us might be quicker to recoil from knowing in the first place.

Or maybe my resistance to pop-culture evangelism has grown more intense because of our atomized way of consuming said culture, now that streaming has nearly obliterated the custom of synchronized, communal viewing (live sports, awards shows, and huge political events aside). I did watch the Super Bowl, after all, and I plan to watch the Oscars, both of which evoke a sense of participation in a shared cultural moment. When it comes to The Pitt—which I can click to play at any time, any day, in solitude—perhaps what I’m resisting, in choosing not to join the crowd, isn’t the hype, but aloneness.

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