I Hate Being “Woke”

Etienne Rodriguez
Jul 22, 2017 · 3 min read

First things first, let me tell you how much I hate the word “woke”. I hate it a lot. Like so much. I hate it more than what most would consider a reasonable amount to hate a word. When the word first came to popularity I was all about it; I wanted to be woke and I wanted to be around woke people. Why wouldn’t I want to be socially aware and strive to make the world a better place?

Well let me tell you why.

It’s tiring and not fun. There’s a reason I’m here writing about how much I hate trying to make the world a better place instead of writing about how to make the world a better place. And you clicked on this and are currently reading it, so what does it say about you? It says that constantly having to analyze what’s wrong with the world is tiring and you’d like nothing better than to just complain about how tiring it is. Or maybe it means something else entirely. But let’s focus on the first option.

Being “woke” is depressing. Imagine waking up every morning, having breakfast, interacting with your friends and family then opening up the morning newspaper to find out that a black person was shot and killed. That’s rough, right? Well imagine waking up, looking at your phone to find out what time it is and then seeing a news alert that a black person was shot and killed. That’s fucking rough. Being aware of what’s happening to the underprivileged is fucking rough. But, I have to do it because one day in 2014 I realized that the world was terrible. Ever since then I’ve been actively opening myself up to the experiences of people across the world and I learn everyday that the world isn’t just terrible it was a mistake.

Ctrl Z the last 500 years, please.

Logically, I should be mad at the Europeans for colonizing the entire world and ruining just about everything that has graced this once beautiful planet. Logically, I am mad at the Europeans because it’s really their fault for this. But those Europeans are dead and I get called racist for being mad at their descendents who perpetuate the system of ruining everything. So instead of being mad at the people who are 100% to blame for everything being ruined, I’m left being mad at being “woke”. I’m mad at a concept. What an incredible life I live. There’s more to why I hate being “woke”, though, and once again it has to do with the descendents of those pesky Europeans who ruined everything.

Because I’m “woke” I’m expected to be that and nothing else. I developed a following on Medium and Twitter because of my social awareness and that’s what people knew me for. On Medium I’m still known for that because that’s what I put out here, but on Twitter I had to actively change my image. I went from being the hardass social justice warrior to the guy who makes terrible jokes and looks cute sometimes. Even with that change in image I still talk about social justice and what’s wrong with this terrible no good very bad world. And when I make those tweets you know they get retweets because my tweets fucking bang. They’re dope as shit. I’m incredible. And then people follow me and expect even more incredible social justice takes because the one they saw was just so good.

Instead they get jokes about literally anything I think of and tweets about how much I want to see Spider-Man die in a movie. And instead of more followers I get people wondering why I’m not talking more about the black person who was just shot and killed or the woman who was attacked or what’s happening in Syria. I’m out here trying to live my damn life and fight my depression and people expect me to instead talk about what’s terrible in the world. It’s not enough to know that the world is terrible I’m expected to break down every terrible thing and tell people what I think. And they don’t even pay me for this shit. They want free labour from me because I’m “woke” and I help them be more “woke”. That’s some bullshit.

I hate being “woke”.

Etienne Rodriguez

Written by

I used to be an angry teen who wrote a lot. Now I’m a jaded “adult” who writes less, but has more opinions.

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