the desire to be sad: "tragically beautiful" art & romanticizing mental illness

"The fact that there was no answer to the question he screamed, "Why do I suffer? " Man, the bravest animal and most prone to suffer, does not deny suffering as such: he wills it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not the suffering, was the curse that lay over mankind so far.

" Between the ages of 11 and 14, I was, like many preteens, riding an emotional dip in my life. I was extremely insecure about my acne and weight, about being judged by the popular kids. I wasn't allowed to sleepover at friends places, or have a phone, or go to the mall without an adult.

And my relationship with my parents was… rocky. It felt as though they never trusted me, and that I would never be a good enough daughter. One of the ways I tried to disperse of my emotions and thoughts was to write a diary entry every day.

I did this for three years. January 11th, 2015 "I don't know why but during French today, this heavy weight feeling in my chest and stomach (I have it all the time) just got really bad. When I breathed faster, it got heavier and I felt like I was going to break down so I went to the washroom… I cried, I picked at my skin… I wish I could forget every mistake in my life.

aka all of it. " March 10th, 2016 "Is there a purpose to all of this? I'm so helpless, so hopeless, so everything less.

My heart constantly aches for love, for joy, for meaning in life. In the book I'm reading, Clockwork Prince, someone called Magnus Bane says that he once met an immortal who had lived for so long that they felt no emotions anymore… except fear. And when Magnus asked him why he did not simply kill himself as life had no purpose for him anymore, he said that death was still feared and unexplored; the only thing in his thousand years of life that he had no experience of.

I feel like that's me. I do not wish to take my life but logically speaking, why shouldn't I? " I sound pitiful in these diary entires.

I sound deeply in need of help, but here's the kicker: I was a fraud. Yes, I was sad a lot. Yes, I had low self esteem.

But I wasn't suicidal. I never had a real panic attack in French class. It’s so embarrassing and disappointing to acknowledge that that’s how I once acted.

But being chronically on Tumblr in the early 2010s did something awful to me: it made me desire intense depression. Mina Le has a video where she discusses how Tumblr, which is kind of like the blog version of Twitter, made being sad an essential part of what made you interesting and so it led to romanticizing mental illness. Mina and others have talked about this quite a bit, so you can check out their content for a deep dive on Tumblr.

But I really want to zoom in on this desire to be sad and to have trauma. Tumblr allowed us to masochistically indulge in self-pain because we received attention, support, and #you’resorelatable comments because of our pain. But what about the situations where we desire sadness for the sake of being sad?

W hen there is no outer audience to give us attention for our sadness? When I was 9 years old, I used to lie in bed with my iPod nano and blast “Demons” by Imagine Drgons as I daydreamed myself being pulled away from my loved ones, watching them thrash in agony. Creating tragic daydreams in my head—starring myself— was one of my favourite past times.

No one knew I was conjuring up these imaginary scenarios and so no one was giving me attention for them. So then why did I enjoy doing it? I also want to explore our love for sad art.

If “tragically beautiful” art aestheticizes suffering and mental illness, then is it moral to create it? And why do we have tropes such as "the troubled artist"? Are the sad and suffering really more creative and “deep” than those without existential dread?

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August 9th, 2016 It's been bothering me all day but there's a pair of scissors beside me on my night table that I left there somehow and every time I see it, I stop. I'm really trying not to cut myself. It's tempting and I deserve it but I'm resisting.

I've been wearing lots of bracelets lately though. I think I just want to give myself an illusion that I'm cutting and getting what I deserve without actually doing it. I just want to be sad.

I don't deserve otherwise. In Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality, he argues that humans experience pleasure in having the right to be wicked to others for the pure sake of being wicked. "The carnal delight de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire.

” We weren't born with a set of morals in Nietzsche's eyes. We didn’t start punishing and torturing people because our inherent moral compass told us that this is a bad person. Labeling someone as deserving of punishment because they have done something wrong is actually a really advanced concept that most people think is natural.

It requires us to recognize that certain events happened in a specific causal chain and that these events weren't just accidental, but intentional, and that these intentions were the wrong kind of intentions. Nietzsche didn't think our cavemen ancestors were big brained enough to be able to think like this, which, fair enough. Instead, he says that the origin of punishment is actually rooted in the “oldest, most primitive” relationship between people: the contractual relationship.

Punishment was premised on the idea that “every injury has its equivalent” and thus, if you hurt me, your “debt” could be paid off by me hurting you an equal amount. In place of material goods or money, people were compensated through the satisfaction of imposing suffering onto someone else. Nietzsche describes many incredibly cruel torture methods that litter human history, such as stoning, boiling criminals alive in oil or wine, tying people to horses and having their limbs ripped apart, I don't even want to continue listing the examples.

It makes me shudder. And these tortures and executions were displayed at royal marriages and festivals for entertainment. It was like comedy show for them.

Yeah, people are scary. However, when humanity started to enter civilized society, it was necessary for people to regulate their cruel pleasures in order to be able to establish a peaceful common existence. Like can you imagine if today, someone came up to you and said, “Hey, you're really cute.

I was thinking. . .

there's this new live show where they boil people alive in oil. I heard it's hilarious! We should check it out!

It sounds like a fun time! Nietzsche claims that this is where the moral concept of guilt comes from. Humanity became ashamed of our own cruel instincts because they were now deemed immoral; thus, people could no longer openly acknowledge and express those instincts.

As a result, our pleasure in cruelty became spiritualized in popular culture. We see this in horror movies or violent sports, where people can enjoy cruelty from a distance. Still, our instincts could not be fully discharged this way, and so they became directed inward, creating bad conscience.

It's that voice in your head that yells at you whenever you feel guilty or immoral about doing something. Humanity experienced what Nietzsche calls “the internalizing of man”. The pleasure that people derive from cruelty is now satisfied through causing ourselves to suffer through things like self-denial and self-sacrifice.

Our consciousness turned against our own uncivil urges. Enjoyment from punishing others was redirected to enjoyment from punishing ourselves. A further reason why Nietzsche believes we desire pain is because the concept "good" was originally synonymous with the traits the aristocratic nobles possessed.

These were the high social ranking men who honored bravery, wealth, strength, and physical health because that's what they believed they had. Calling themselves 'good' was a way to use language to assert that they are superior by nature, and Nietzsche cites etymological proof such as “gut” being German for both 'good' and “man of godly race”. From this aristocratic framework of goodness, the concept ‘bad’ emerged as the absence of these good traits, which the aristocrats associated as the traits the common people had.

This bred a mixture of resentment and desire for revenge among the masses. Now, I'm glossing over a lot of details, but to keep it short, eventually, the common people end up establishing a moral system of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’. Now this is different from 'good' versus 'bad'.

Remember that the aristocratic form of morality defined ‘good’ first and contrasted the concept of ‘bad' afterward. However, for the common folk, ‘evil’ was defined first. Evil was associated with all the previous ‘good’ traits that aristocratic morality praised, so that wealth, power, ambition, pleasure became evil.

‘Good’ was defined as merely the opposite of ‘evil’; ‘good’ is not powerful, not strong, not wealthy. We see this is basically every religion where it is a virtue to not seek power over others, to sacrifice our things and time for others, to resist worldly pleasures. We see it in popular culture too where people prefer to be the victim because that's who the masses will side with, not the powerful.

So in Nietzsche’s eyes, we purposely subject ourselves to pain, and then call it "being as a good person. " Are we stupid? Well, if suffering and sadness is an inevitable part of life, then to make ourselves suffer gives us a sense of control over our pain.

We have self-mastery over our existence this way. And we attach moral value to feeling shameful, feeling guilty, and depriving ourself of pleasure, because then at least suffering and feeling bad about ourselves makes us a good person, and we aren't hurting for nothing. There is meaning to our pain.

"He who has a why can bear any how. " Viktor Frankl says that the ultimate drive of humanity is a will to meaning. As a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, he said that merely surviving the camp wasn't his main concern.

What he really wanted to know was whether all the dying around him had meaning, for if there was no meaning, no purpose for the death and cruel torture of innocent lives around him, then what was the point of survival? What was besetting the question the problem which was besetting myself was not as much whether or not I shall survive the camp but whether or not all this pain those pains people had to undergo innocent people had to undergo there, whether all this dying around us has a meaning an ultimate, a higher meaning or not. For if it had no meaning, I didn't see any meaning even to survive.

In his book, Man's Search for Meaning, he writes, “In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of sacrifice… That is why man is even ready to suffer, on the condition, to be sure, that his suffering has a meaning. ” This heavily reminds me of the episode “Good Damage” in the TV show “Bojack Horseman” where a character named Diane explains that she needs to write a profound memoir about her life because if she doesn't, then all the trauma and hardships she's faced will have happened for nothing. But I'm not writing a book to have fun.

If I don't write my book of essays now, I never will. So? Don't write your book of essays!

I have to! Why? Because if I don't.

. . that means that all the damage I got isn't good damage, it's just damage.

I have gotten nothing out of it, and all those years I was miserable was for nothing. I could've been happy this whole time and written books about girl detectives, and been cheerful and popular, and had good parents. Is that what you're saying?

What was it all for? I. .

. I don't know, Diane. This idea of “good damage” is exactly what Frankl and Nietzsche writes about.

Damage with meaning is acceptable. It can even make us feel special, like we are stronger than those who haven't endured hardships. But damage as plain damage?

Now that's what really hurts. When I was a little girl, I thought that everything, all the abuse and neglect, it somehow made me. .

. special. And I decided that one day, I would write something that would make little girls like me feel less alone.

And. . .

if I can't write that book. . .

December 10th, 2016 “I plant all my frustrations and words I'm dying to tell someone—anyone—away deep down inside of me. One day, that seed of misery I planted will blossom. Or maybe it already has.

Now it's only a matter of time to see if that sprout dies or flourishes until it's all that's left of me. ” Wow. I thought I was quite the little poet, didn't I.

You know, I thought that in order to give my sad emotions meaning, I had to make my sadness sound “right. ” I couldn't just scribble down diary entries however I wanted with simple language and basic sentence structure. Who am I, Rupi Kaur?

God no, I had to write beautifully. Preteen Olivia made sure that her sadness was translated into words that sounded straight out of black and white deep Tumblr GIFs. I needed my thoughts and feelings to be beautiful because that's the only time I saw society value mental illness: when it was delivered to us in the form of aesthetic art.

In fact, I felt that to be deep and introspective, I needed to be sad. I had to be lonely and pessimistic in order to be truly enlightened about real life. These beliefs I held were heavily influenced by the sad art I consumed.

When it comes to TV shows and film, it’s a special and powerful type of communication because it's not limited to one sensory input. As McCloskey puts it, film engages both our sight and hearing, which puts us in a "'trance' or dissociative state similar to a dream, causing the viewer to become so deeply absorbed into the film that all of the technical aspects that go into its creation are largely forgotten and unbothered by the viewer. ” The ability of film to mimic real life experiences makes it easy for us to forget for an hour or so that this story has gone through countless layers of editing, cutting, colouring, effects, music choice, etc.

For those who don't know anyone struggling with a mental illness, watching a film about mental illness will play a huge role in how they perceive real people with mental illness. But to make an enjoyable movie, especially for a younger audience, filmmakers want attractive characters with interesting plot and memorable lines. This means that many serious films about mental illness must incorporate unrealistic aesthetics into the project.

In the film Girl Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen is a character who is in a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt. She’s played by Winona Ryder, who is gorgeous, and the cast is full of other A list attractive celebs such as Jared Leto, Elisabeth Moss, Angelina Jolie, just to name a few. The script is filled with poetic lines.

In one popular scene that was reblogged a lot on Tumblr, Susanna says, It makes this suicidal woman sound like a depressed poet. She's attractive, she speaks like an insightful poet, and one of the male nurses in her ward ends up falling in love with her. I find that one of the common ways films and shows romanticize mental illness is by adding in a love interest.

For example, another highly popular TV show with mentally ill characters was American Horror Story. Tate tells his therapist that he is interested in a girl, Violet, based off of their first interaction where he catches her harming herself and then tells her how to harm herself permanently. Violet, the girl Tate loves, even commits suicide because he asked her to.

American Horror Story fans called it romantic and shipped them like no tomorrow. Preteen Olivia was constantly surrounded by this kind of media and it made me want to be the mentally complex girl who attracted love because of my deep insight on life. I was scared of not being able to relate to sad songs and quotes anymore.

I didn't want to enjoy life and be satisfied with myself because I believed that would make me stupid, and boring, and blind to harsh reality. So many great artists I learned about had dark histories of alcoholism, or depression, or abuse, and all the songs that were considered artistic were created from a negative place. Bubblegum pop music with lyrics about having fun?

That was considered trashy and shallow. Only art that touched on the dark sides of life felt truly authentic and intellectual to me. This is not to discredit the artistry and bravery that goes into creating vulnerable art— I have so much respect for those people.

But does being sad and mentally ill really make you more creative and deep? There appears to be many past studies that think so. For example, in 1995, a study by Ludwig examined the biographies of 1005 accomplished people in a variety of fields, including academic, business, artistic, social, activist, military, and athletic fields.

He claimed to find that writers, actors, artists, and musicians had the most “psychiatric difficulty” but also the highest levels of creativity, Moreover, in 1994, a study by Post assessed 291 biographies of accomplished males in a variety of fields as well. He also found high rates of psychiatric disorders in writers and artists as well as high rates of depression and alcoholism. But one big problem connects all these studies: there is no universal agreed upon understanding of "creativity" nor "mental illness.

" In trying to define creativity, here's just a quick glimpse at how many studies differed in their definitions: “Becker equated creativity with genius or intellectual giftedness. Richards suggested that intelligence was necessary but not sufficient for creativity. Storr defined creativity as a dynamic of normal drives to play.

Independence was mentioned by Andreasen and Glick, and fluency and flexibility were cited by Jamison as essential to creativity. Rothenberg defined creativity as the ability to simultaneously conceive opposites or antitheses. .

. Weisberg stressed that creativity required hard work and collaboration. ” Defining “mental illness” runs into the same problem.

Foucault, a French philosopher and sociologist, suggested that labeling people as mentally ill was just a socially constructed category to control people that were deviant from the norm. Other studies might just use the standard DSM definitions. Because of a lack of agreed-upon understanding for these extremely fundamental terms, it's hard to trust whether these supposed associations that these studies found between mental illness and creativity actually exist.

In fact, more recent studies proposed that the mentally ill seem more drawn to the arts because they offer methods of expression and catharsis. It's not that mental illness biologically wires your brain to be more creative. Art is just an appealing avenue for those who hold such passionate emotions.

Once artists heal from their illness, studies find that they tend to create and enjoy their art even more. Any artistic product though, begs an audience. And sad art from sad people definitely draws a crowd.

Again, something that is sad is often immediately equated with depth. Young alt girls love to let you know that they listen to Mitski and Phoebe Bridgers. No hate to these two wonderful musicians, just sometimes, their fanbase can feel reminiscent of 2014 Tumblr girls.

There are two main psychological theories as to why people enjoy sad music. The first claims that the motive behind music choice is hedonic, i. e.

, shot term decisions about what will maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Supporters of this hedonic motive theory argue that many study participants describe sad music as making them feel good, whether it's pleasure from how depressingly beautiful it sounds, or how it's lower energy levels feel calming and relaxing. The second theory says that listening to sad music is motivated by self-verification i.

e. , sad music verifies your sense of self. Self-verification theory says that people prefer having information that is consistent with the beliefs they have about themselves because having a solid concept of ourself allows us understand the role we play in the world.

February 9th, 2015 “My piano teacher pretended not to know who I was today cause I tied up my hair and he said, “are you the best piano student or the worst? ” I wanted to say worst so badly cause I actually suck really bad. At the end of the class he was like “Now remember who you are in case I don't know who you are again!

” But how am I supposed to tell him who I am when I don't know myself? ” We feel stable when we know who we are and so people are really motivated to maintain self-concepts. As such, individuals may be motivated to experience emotions that affirm existing self-concepts they believe in, regardless of whether those emotions are positive and pleasurable or negative.

For those who struggle with mental health, they may actively seek negative emotions to maintain their negative self-concept. For instance, individuals with depression were shown to use sad music to intensify negative emotions and to focus on negative thoughts and memories. Even for mentally healthy people, when they feel down, listening to sad music is ".

. . an important way to reveal one's true self.

. . to express emotions consistent with one's current psychological and emotional state.

" Even if I don't usually feel sad all the time, if I feel sad right now, then listening to sad music makes me feel like I am affirming the concept I attached to myself in the moment. And that feels good. It verifies my identity.

What this paper proposes is that the theories of hedonic motive and self-verifying motive cannot be generalized. the motives differ between those with mental illness, especially those with mood disorders, and those without. “.

. . depressed subjects seem to be driven by the need of preserving a stable self-concept, regardless of any hedonic gain.

Those quality differences in motives might make the desire for sadness more harmful in depressed than in healthy individuals, as they may be more persistent… the hedonic driven consumption of sad media might occur on an occasional basis [for healthy individuals]. . .

and does not impact the affective well-being in the long run, [but] consumption driven by self-verification motives may occur systematically as sad stimuli might be constantly sought out to stabilize the negative self-schema. ” I feel stuck in a tricky spot because I don't know what to say about the morals of sad art. On the one hand, many philosophers and psychologists talk about how aesthetics and sad art are extremely important.

It may provide catharsis, help you feel less alone, find beauty in hard times, or express feelings that you never could. It can provide unique positive emotions that happy or neutral music struggles to, such as nostalgia or calm. But is this the case for everyone, or only the mentally healthy?

I remember when I was constantly sad, I pretty much only listened to sad and angry music because paradoxically, I wanted to reaffirm the sadness in me. I was scared of what would happen if I became happier. There's this one part from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil where he says, “It almost determines the order of rank how profoundly human beings can suffer… Profound suffering makes noble; it separates.

” And I truly believed that. The more I suffered, the more profound I must be. I don't want to blame artists who release sad content because there is undeniable value in it and they don't control how people interpret their art.

But when someone like Preteen Olivia reads lyrics like this, "You must've made some kind of mistake I asked for death, but instead, I'm awake The Devil told me, "No room for cheats" I thought I'd sold my soul, but he kept the receipt” It makes suicide and depression sound so poetic. How could I not feel a sense of beauty attached to it? Let me know what you think.

Is tragically beautiful art immoral? Or is it unfair to label art as moral or immoral if the artist is not responsible for every single person that consumes their art? Is it only healthy for some people to consume sad art?

I. . .

don't know. Pain of not having enough pain. Still pain, young man.

On December 10th, 2017, I wrote my very last diary entry. “Long time… been a while. I've had quite a few urges to write over these past months but I never did.

Was it out of fear? Fear of falling down a deep tunnel where only writing could calm me down? Or was it denial of how bad I still am?

I think it's a bit of both… It all started in sixth grade when I moved and I watched as my friends’ promises of forever friendships crumbled. H stopped calling me after 2 weeks. R ended up hella pissed and they dedicated a full page paragraph to me on how shitty I was.

Then there was M, T, A, R, and B. Thank you so much for ditching me as soon as you got the chance to… Yeah, I know. I'm a fucking awful person but we already had that established 3 years ago so… I've been writing for a long time now.

I was supposed to dance but now I wasted around an hour writing. Great. Those numbers on the scale will never go down no matter how much exercise I do.

I'm still trying to accept the fact that I'll always be fat no matter what. It's never going to change. I should go now.

I think I've spilled enough depressing shit for today. ” Sometimes, I can't help but wonder: what would my preteen years have been like if I didn't go out of my way to induce sadness? If had stayed away from Tumblr communities that romanticized mental illness and convinced me that without sadness, I wasn't interesting.

I may not have been suicidal and I may not have been clinically depressed, but. . .

I was sad. And Tumblr only made me want to stay sad. Maybe it was unavoidable.

Maybe Tumblr and tragically beautiful art was only fueling what already existed inside me. In Sapiens, Yuval Harrari said that humans are biologically born with different sets of happiness and so by nature, some people are more capable of happiness than others. Person A may be able to feel happiness on a scale of 1 to 10, while Person B may only be able to feel happiness up to the highest level of 8.

Now, I am the last person to ask about biology or neuroscience or chemistry, so I have no clue how credible this claim is. But if it is, I think it has huge implications for how we approach the desire to be sad. Being sad is fine, there is value in negative emotion.

I just hope it isn't a state people obsessively pursue and glorify, the way I once did. This phenomenon of desiring illness isn't new by any means. In the 1800s, tuberculosis was widely romanticized.

Tuberculosis had awful symptoms of coughing up blood, significant weight loss, intense fatigue and eventually death. But the illness was addressed with an air of “tragic loveliness. ” 19th century popular literature depicted tuberculosis as the illness of a beautiful young artist, who despite their suffering, continued to engage in painting, music, and other artistic and intellectual activities.

This became known as the aesthetic of the "faded flower" that so many young girls tried to actually strive for. Young women began to purposely try to appear frail, thin, and pale. However, as medical knowledge advanced, better hygiene, nutrition practices, and medical tools allowed society to understand what was actually going on when someone contracted tuberculosis.

Physical illness became understood and so it was demystefied, There was no mystery surrounding tuberculosis anymore, and with that curious mystery gone, its charm was also lost. Slowly, people stopped romanticizing it. Today, rarely do people romanticize physical illness the way they do with mental illness because our knowledge of physical illness is quite comprehensive, but mental illness has now taken the position of mystery.

There's still a lot we don't understand about the mind and so it leaves room for people to create their own perceptions and imaginations. Maybe, as medical knowledge about mental illness evolves, it too will lose its charm. I just cut my bangs recently so they look awful in this video.

Um, but. . .

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Let's keep talking, and I hope to hear from you soon. Bye!