"Hate: The passionate and/or intense feeling of dislike for someone or something."

Sadly, this emotion is something we all know too well. The question we are faced with is this: why is this horrendous sentiment so common and excepted? This article is going to challenge the idea that the answer is much closer than you know.

I would like to take you back to when you were younger - when you were just a child (probably around five or six for cinematics). If you were like me, and many others, you were most likely in kindergarten. You were probably spending your time playing with your favorite toys or participating in a game of horse or jump rope. You were friendly with everyone you met and trusted almost everyone. You never saw a problem with wearing your heart on your sleeve and being a friend to all you met. But one day someone came up to you and noticed you were different from them and pointed it out. At first you probably thought nothing of it. Then you started getting older and you fell into that nasty habit which everyone does - categorizing.

"Categorizing: to place others in a specific class or group."

This habit most likely began to (noticeably) rear its ugly head during lunch time in grade school. I’m sure you can recall the lunch room being quite segregated. This wasn’t too terrible, as it's an instinctual approach to associate with people like you. The main issue ensues when we start to subconsciously correlate specific emotions with this segregation.

After prolonged times of categorization, your brain starts to compare other groups to your own. This simple cognitive act starts to solidify the idea in your mind that your group is better than any others.

Now you are in junior high. People have started to grasp onto the aforementioned concept and inflate it. This time in your life you are beginning your lovely journey through puberty. As we all are aware, during puberty your hormones go crazy, causing you to have sporadic emotions. At this point, you are in desperate search of finding a place to outlet these rampaging emotions. This is when you turn to those subconsciously categorized people and seek a place to release your hostility; whether it be inwardly or outwardly.

I’m sure you can see were this leads. When you reach high school, all of these emotions you correlated to the different categorized people grows with you into racism, sexism, and all the other forms of hate you can think of. You may be thinking right now that you're not guilty of aforementioned things, but think about it. Have you ever got onto the bus with no empty seats and passed on sitting next to someone different from you? Whether that person be white, Indian, Arabic, black, Latino? Or even because of their different sex or weight? Why did you do that? Was it because you felt uncomfortable? Why is that? It's because you still harbor that concept of categorization in the back of your mind.

So, therefore, I challenge you to associate with and be kind to someone different than you this week. Fight against that haunting concept of categorization. Let everyone know you don’t care about differences. Let’s end categorization together. #DontCategorize