Ballet flats are back. Everyone’s saying it—Vogue, the TikTok girlies, The New York Times, Instagram’s foremost fashion narcs, the whole gang. Shoes from trendsetting brands such as Alaïa and Miu Miu line store shelves, and hundreds of cheap alternatives are available online at fast-fashion juggernauts such as Shein and Temu. You can run from the return of the ballet flat, but you can’t hide. And, depending on how much time your feet spent in the shoes the last time they were trendy, maybe you can’t run either.

The ballet flat—a slipperlike, largely unstructured shoe style meant to evoke a ballerina’s pointe shoes—never disappears from the fashion landscape entirely, but its previous period of decided coolness was during the mid-to-late 2000s. Back then, teens were swathing themselves in Juicy Couture and Abercrombie & Fitch, Lauren Conrad was ruining her life by turning down a trip to Paris on The Hills, and fashion magazines were full of Lanvin and Chloé and Tory Burch flats. The style was paired with every kind of outfit you could think of—the chunky white sneaker of its day, if you will.

How you feel about the shoes’ revival likely has a lot to do with your age. If you’re young enough to be witnessing ballet flats’ popularity for the first time, then maybe they seem like a pleasantly retro and feminine departure from lug soles and sneakers. If, like me, you’ve made it past 30(ish), the whole thing might make you feel a little old. Physically, ballet flats are a nightmare for your back, your knees, your arches; when it comes to support, most offer little more than you’d get from a pair of socks. Spiritually, the injury might be even worse. Twenty years is a normal amount of time to have passed for a trend to be revived as retro, but it’s also a rude interval at which to contemplate being punted out of the zeitgeist in favor of those who see your youth as something to be mined for inspiration—and therefore as something definitively in the past.

Trends are a funny thing. Especially in fashion, people see trends as the province of the very young, but tracing their paths is often less straightforward. Take normcore’s dad sneakers: In the mid-2010s, the shoes became popular among Millennials, who were then hitting their 30s, precisely because they were the sneakers of choice for retired Boomers. But in order for a trend to reach the rare heights of population-level relevance, very young people do eventually need to sign on. In the case of dad sneakers, it took years for Zoomers to come around en masse, but their seal of approval has helped keep bulky New Balances popular for nearly a decade—far past the point when most trends fizzle.

The return of ballet flats is a signal of this new cohort of fashion consumers asserting itself even more widely in the marketplace. The trends young people endorse tend to swing between extremes. The durable popularity of dad shoes all but guaranteed that some young people would eventually start to look for something sleeker and less substantial. The ballet flat fits perfectly within the turn-of-the-millennium fashion tropes—overplucked eyebrows, low-rise jeans, tiny sunglasses—that Zoomers have been tinkering with for several years.

Ballet flats are an all-the-more-appropriate sign of a generational shift, in fact, because they are the folly of youth made manifest. Wearing them is an act of violence against podiatry, yes, but their drawbacks go further. Many ballet flats are so flimsy that they look trashed after only a few wears. They’re difficult to pair with socks, so they stink like feet almost as quickly. Ballet flats are impractical shoes that sneak into closets under the guise of practicality—hey, they’re not high heels!—and prey on people who do not yet know better.

What does that mean, then, for the people who do know better? For one, it means that the extended adolescence that some Millennials experienced following the Great Recession is finally, inarguably over. We’re old, at least relatively speaking. Every generation eventually ages out of the particular cultural power of youth and then watches as younger people make mistakes that seem obvious in hindsight, and the ballet flat is a reminder that people my age are no longer the default main characters in culture that we once were. When I was a middle schooler begging for a pair of wooden-soled Candie’s platform sandals in the mid-’90s, I remember my mother, in a fit of exasperation, telling me that I couldn’t have them because she saw too many people fall off their platforms in the ’70s. This is the first time I remember contemplating my mom as a human being who existed long before I was conscious of her: someone who bought cool but ill-advised clothes and uncomfortable shoes, who went to parties where people sometimes had a hard time remaining upright.

Even the cool girls with the coolest shoes at some point grow to regard parts of their past selves as a bit silly, and they become the people trying to save the kids from their own fashion hubris. This sensation is undoubtedly acute for Millennials, because this hubris is displayed most prominently in an arena they used to rule: the internet. On TikTok, the world’s hottest trend machine, the over-30 crowd is more onlooker than participant, and the youth are using the platform to encourage one another to dress like they’re going to a party at the Delt house in 2007. Someone has to warn them.

If you’re realizing that this someone is you, my advice would be to not let the generational responsibilities of aging weigh too heavily on you. The upside of losing your spot at culture’s center stage, after all, is freedom. You can look around at what’s fashionable, pick the things that work for you, and write off the rest as the folly of youth. (The Zoomers are right: The lug-soled combat boots that I wore in high school actually are very cool.) In place of chasing trends, you can cultivate taste. When you fail at taste, at least you can be aware of your own questionable decisions. In the process of writing this article, I realized that French Sole still makes the exact same prim little flats that I must have bought three or four times over during the course of my first post-college job, in the late 2000s. They’re as flimsy as ever, but whatever made me love them 15 years ago is still there, buried under all of my better judgment. I haven’t closed the tab quite yet.

Let’s just get this out of the way: I don’t like dogs. I don’t like the way they smell. I don’t like the way they jump on your dry-clean-only pants. I especially don’t like the way they “get to know you.” (I generally don’t like to be poked down there unless it’s so someone can tell me whether I have HPV.) I don’t believe animals are equal to people; I can’t believe $15,000 pet surgeries exist in a country where not every person can get health care.

I’ve long kept this feeling to myself, because in America, saying you don’t like dogs is like saying you think the Taliban has some good ideas. Recently, however, I learned about a community of people just like me: The Dogfree Subreddit. I don’t use Reddit much, but immediately, I was taken by r/Dogfree’s tagline: “We don’t like dogs.” I had never before seen this, my most taboo opinion, written out so plainly.

That first day on the site, I couldn’t stop reading posts, which are mostly news reports of dog bites, complaints about seeing dogs in public, and gripes about sidewalk poop, barking, and other dog-related externalities. One post is titled, “The fact they breathe with their mouths open and tongues hanging is enough for me to want nothing to do with them.” As I read my same unpopular views, reflected back by other people, I was overcome by the thrill of being truly known, by the unmistakable gasp of catharsis.

[Read: What do dogs know about us?]

The Subreddit’s FAQ includes a response to a frequent assumption that, surely, our problem is with unruly dogs and their oblivious owners. “Though it might be a tough pill to swallow,” the moderators respond, “we in this sub simply don’t like dogs.”

A few bad experiences crystallized my lifelong disdain. On top of not liking dogs, I’m allergic to them. When I was 9, I had to be picked up from a friend’s slumber party after her dachshund crawled across my pillow and my eyes swelled shut. I still remember the indignity of having to call my parents, the thick stupor brought on by extra-strength Benadryl, the painful wheezing as I ran my face under the tap at 2 a.m. It was my introduction to the fact that it’s a dog’s world and I’m just living in it.

Other times, I’ve had scary run-ins with dogs that were trying to “protect” their owners. In grad school, my boyfriend’s roommate had a pitbull that would terrorize me whenever I went over while the roommate stood back and laughed. “He’s friendly!” he’d say dismissively. (The Dogfree people hate when dog owners say this.) When we first moved into our house, our neighbor’s enormous dog, apparently confusing us for intruders, bounded into our yard and ran straight at me, barking wildly. I screamed an expletive. The neighbor did nothing. This is probably why I never bothered to meet those neighbors.

None of these encounters, of course, were particularly dangerous. But they cemented an impression that dogs are at best gross, and at worst threatening. More recently, I was with a group of people that included a pediatric reconstructive plastic surgeon. She told us about her job mending the faces of kids who have been in horrible accidents, and someone asked her, “Seeing what you see in your profession, what’s one thing you would never do?” “Get a pitbull,” she said quietly.

But this kind of thing just doesn’t trouble most people. The majority of Americans own a pet, and dogs are the most popular pet choice. Americans are more attached to their dogs than they are to their cats or other animals: Most dog owners say the dog is as much a part of their family as a human family member. If forced to choose, 39 percent of Americans would rather save their closest pet from death than one human person. I may not understand this bond, but I know I can’t argue with it. All of this leads to a lot of pent-up anti-dog sentiment, which I was happy to off-gas on r/Dogfree.

At last, a place to discuss the revulsion of seeing a “dog blanket” on someone’s couch, which you’re expected to sit on even though it’s covered in hair and god knows what else. Or your outrage over an incident in which a dog attacked a 6-year-old girl. Or the extreme strangeness of the fact that owning a dog requires you, the human, to scoop the poop of them, the animal, into little bags, which many humans then leave scattered around everywhere. When I read Dogfree, I think, I’m right to hate dogs.

According to a 2019 unscientific survey of 2,000 people who claimed to be members, Dogfree’s 56,000 Redditors are 57 percent female and mostly live in North America. They were drawn to the Subreddit because they feel socially pressured to like dogs, or don’t appreciate when people prioritize dogs over people, among other reasons. A lot of them, though, just simply have never liked dogs. Most aren’t allergic, but most are afraid of at least certain kinds of dogs. And it’s not an anti-animal Subreddit: Less than a quarter are totally pet-free and plan to remain that way; lots of members express a desire to care for a cat.

[From the September 2021 issue: Why so many Millennials are obsessed with dogs]

One user, GemstoneWriter, a 19-year-old who has been a member for about nine months, thinks dogs are loud and dirty, but she tries to think of dog owners as “lost, rather than enemies,” she told me over Reddit chat. (She agreed to be identified only by her Reddit handle.) She doesn’t like how some people elevate dogs to nearly the status of human children. Still, she doesn’t admit to many people that she dislikes dogs, and Dogfree makes her feel less alone. When someone’s attacked by a dog, she likes how people in the Subreddit empathize with the victim instead of defending the dog or owner.

(Illustration by Sawwft)

Emma Allum, a 41-year-old member in Southeast England, gets unnerved when big dogs veer toward her or stare at her. “I don’t like it when they lick me,” she told me, “and when you’re just walking along, minding your own business, and some big dog shouts in your ear from behind the garden fence.” During our Zoom call, it felt uncanny to hear this thought coming from someone else. When a dog licks me, all I can think about is how soon I can take a shower.

Allum’s fear of dogs sharpened over a series of jarring incidents, such as when one dog tried to sniff her baby son while he sat in his stroller and when another charged at her in a field. But dogs are popular in her area, so if you’re afraid of dogs, “you are made to feel like a bit of a plonker,” she said. Not so on the Subreddit. There are no plonkers there.

The Subreddit is an example of a “negativity friendship”—a community of people united by something they don’t like. (In politics, negative partisanship is a similar phenomenon.) Several studies—which remarkably did not involve me as a participant—have found that hating the same person brings people closer together than liking the same person does. We seem to appreciate the risk the other person took in revealing something so unsavory; if we share the unsavory view, all the better. In a world where pretty much everyone likes travel and hiking and coffee, your tribe comprises those who hate what you hate. “Because of the potential social repercussions and relative rarity of revealing negative attitudes, perceivers view negative attitudes as especially informative,” one such study finds.

In fact, the more I perused r/Dogfree, the more I found I disliked dogs—and the less I could see any other point of view. The forum kept reminding me of new ways dogs are disgusting. I’m not normally paranoid about dog bites, but Dogfree makes maulings seem widespread. Dog owners aren’t allowed to post in the Subreddit, so we never get a sense of, say, how owners would prefer to be told that we don’t want to pet their dog. Though I’m sure no dog lovers will be friends with me after this story anyway, it seems like simultaneously staying active in the Subreddit and remaining close with a doting dog parent would be difficult. At one point, I was apparently reading so much anti-dog propaganda that my phone’s hidden algorithms took note and TikTok served me a video about a woman whose top lip was ripped off by a pitbull. We know what you like, it seemed to say. You like to hate on dogs.

After a while, I started to question whether this was actually healthy. Some of the posts on the Subreddit seemed like they were stoking fear and rage rather than offering support. Is it really that bad to see a dog with its head sticking out of a car? Do dogs really not belong in nature? Is it truly that annoying when a dog looks at you?

The Subreddit is also an example of an echo chamber, but whether echo chambers are harmful, per se, is unclear. From studies of partisan political news, researchers have concluded that not only are very few people actually members of echo chambers; seeing mostly one-sided news doesn’t appear to radicalize people as much as we may fear. In studies of people who spent months consuming partisan news, “people’s views did not become more extreme and people did not become more hostile toward the other side,” Magdalena Wojcieszak, a professor at UC Davis who has studied online polarization, told me.

[Read: Reddit gave its moderators freedom—and power]

The moderators of the Subreddit didn’t respond to my requests for an interview, but in a post in which they urged members not to talk with reporters, they essentially agreed with this analysis: “We’re accused on an almost-daily basis of being an ‘echo chamber,’ but we don’t find that to be an inaccurate or even unfavorable perception of us; perhaps it’s an echo chamber, but it’s the only one we have.”

Nevertheless, I started to feel like this whole thing might be a giant yucking of a yum, a slam book we were compiling on the rest of the school. The Subreddit doesn’t allow posts about animal abuse, but I was a little taken aback by the attitude of one user, who chatted me: “I fuckin hate dogs, wish they’d die out as a species, and my dream job would be head euthanizer at the pound.” Yeesh.

I wouldn’t want to own a dog myself, but I generally believe that people have a right to do what makes them happy, as long as it doesn’t affect anyone else. The dog owners who can manage that should be left in peace! I occasionally felt bad participating in the disparagement of animals that didn’t get a say in whether they became pets, are only obeying their natural instincts, and, after all, can’t even read.

Allum told me that although, on the whole, she finds the Subreddit validating, she’s careful not to get too sucked in. She skips some of the articles about dog bites, figuring they won’t do anything to help with her fear. Lots of people on the Subreddit hate dogs, but Allum doesn’t. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, okay, this person has said this, but I don’t actually hate dogs,’” she told me.

This is the problem we all face online: the tricky balance of joining in without losing ourselves. It’s being religious without becoming a zealot, sharing without one-upping, not letting your stated beliefs outrun your actual opinions. Life inside the echo chamber is cozy, but also cacophonous.

I still think I will visit Dogfree occasionally, and I still think it’s a good place for people to talk about their fear of dogs—a stigmatized and poorly understood phobia. I still wish I didn’t have to interact with dogs as often as I do.

But I will probably find a wider group of Subreddits to follow. After all, the site offers plenty of options. For example, I don’t like cats, either.

Lina Lutfiawati was given a two year sentence over the video showing her praying before eating crispy pork.