DARK SECRETS: Infuriating horrible people | Rare Historical Photos

Nobody has catalogued the specific taxonomy of terrible people quite like Ricky Gervais, who has made an entire second career out of publicly loathing the kinds of behaviour most people only complain about privately. His list reads like a greatest hits of shared human suffering: loud chewing, open-mouthed chomping, and sniffing.

Whistling at unreasonable hours. Men in gym changing rooms doing their hair and weighing themselves with the towel still very much not on their body, in front of God and everyone, completely unbothered. Waiters sniffing at the wrong moment. Other diners existing in the same restaurant.

Gervais is, in many ways, the patron saint of this list, a man who looked at the full spectrum of human behaviour and knew that most of it needed to be said out loud, loudly, repeatedly, until something changed. Sadly, nothing has changed and the list continues to grow.

Hugh Grant, meanwhile, has taken a different organisational approach to his grievances. Rather than a gratitude journal, Grant keeps an active list of things he hates, updated regularly and maintained with the dedication of a man who has given this considerable thought.

His specific entries include slow walkers, which is a position almost universally shared, people shouting into their phones on speakerphone in public spaces, and, perhaps most specifically, anyone wearing a backpack in a crowd, who he regards as an unwitting weapon of mass inconvenience. Hugh Grant is 70% grumpy old man and 30% exactly right, and we respect the ratio enormously.

In case you were wondering whether your hatred of loud chewing is personal or clinical, surveys have the answer: it is both. Up to 32% of people report strong negative reactions to the sound of open-mouthed chewing, a condition that in its more severe form is recognised as misophonia, a real neurological phenomenon in which specific sounds trigger disproportionate emotional responses.

Beyond chewing, the most universally despised public behaviours include speakerphone calls conducted in shared spaces and playing music without headphones, which is the audio equivalent of blowing cigarette smoke directly into a stranger's face. These are, according to the data, civilisation-level concerns.

The title of worst tourist by nationality is a deeply unfair cultural stereotype or an empirically supported international consensus. American tourists consistently claim the top spot in global polls, cited for volume, demands, and a general expectation that the rest of the world operates on their schedule and in their language.

What makes this finding particularly extraordinary is that 44% of American respondents in a Triposo survey voted their own country's travelers as the absolute worst, making Americans not only the most complained-about tourists globally but also their own harshest critics, which is refreshingly self-aware.

Few acts of deliberate destruction have stirred up the level of public grief that followed the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree in September 2023. The 200-year-old tree was chainsawed to the ground in the early hours of the morning during Storm Agnes by two men who filmed it, sent boastful voice notes about it, and kept a piece of the wood as a trophy.

Prosecutors described it as a "moronic mission of sheer bravado." The judge, who rejected their late claim of drunken stupidity on the grounds that precision felling requires deliberate planning and skill, sentenced both men to four years and three months in prison. The tree was irreplaceable. The prison sentence, in the circumstances, felt almost insufficient.

The selfie at Auschwitz problem has not gotten better. Neither has the one at the Berlin Memorial, where 2,711 concrete slabs have become a particularly contested space. The open-air design has led visitors to treat it as a backdrop for yoga poses, jumping photos, and Tinder profile pictures.

In 2017, Israeli-German satirist Shahak Shapira created the Yolocaust project in direct response, taking twelve selfies from social media and digitally superimposing the subjects onto archival footage from extermination camps. The man juggling between concrete slabs suddenly appeared to be juggling in front of piles of bodies, and the yoga princess was suddenly standing on top of a mass grave.

The project went viral. All twelve individuals contacted Shapira and asked to be removed. He agreed on the condition that they reflected on why they were there in the first place. The fact that this project needed to exist is the most depressing sentence in this entire article.