I think being miserable is one of the most aesthetically pleasing things we've ever invented.
Think about it.
Rain against a window. Cigarettes. Someone sitting alone on the floor at 3am. A messy bedroom. A song that sounds like it's being played through a blown-out speaker. A character who hasn't smiled since 2004. Black eyeliner running down someone's face. Poetry about wanting to disappear. All those cliche things.
Apparently suffering looks fucking fantastic.
And I don't think this is a new thing. Humans have been making art out of being miserable forever. We've written books about miserable people, painted miserable people, made songs about miserable people and then listened to those songs while being miserable ourselves.
Which raises the question:
"why?"
Why would I willingly listen to a song that makes me feel like shit?
Why do I love horror movies when I know I'm going to spend the next hour feeling uncomfortable?
Why does Crime and Punishment somehow make me want to crawl inside a wall and also make me want to keep reading?
Why do people watch movies about lonely, fucked-up characters and then go wow, I really relate to that?
Maybe because misery makes things feel real.
Happiness is nice, but it's difficult to explain. Nobody usually writes a twelve-page poem about having a completely normal Tuesday where everything went fine. Nobody makes a three-hour movie about someone having a moderately pleasant week.
But suffering gives you something to investigate.
You start asking questions.
Why do I feel like this?
Why did they do that?
Why can't I stop thinking about it?
And suddenly something that felt completely pointless has a story attached to it.
I think that's also why sad music can weirdly make you feel better.
You can be having the worst day imaginable, put on something that sounds even worse, and somehow feel understood.
Not fixed.
Not necessarily happier.
Just less alone.
There's something comforting about hearing somebody else put a feeling into words that you couldn't.
And then there's the other side of it.
The part where sadness becomes an aesthetic.
We've all seen it.
Someone discovers cigarettes, black clothes and one depressing album and suddenly they're the "main character in a 2007 music video".
I can't even completely make fun of it because I've done the same thing.
I think there's something incredibly tempting about turning your sadness into an object.
If I'm miserable, but I can make my misery look interesting, maybe it doesn't feel quite so pointless.
You can turn it into music.
You can turn it into writing.
You can put posters on your wall.
You can make a playlist with an unnecessarily dramatic name.
You can watch a movie about someone significantly more fucked up than you and think,
"holy shit that's me"
Sometimes we stop expressing sadness and start performing it.
There's a difference between genuinely finding comfort in sad art and desperately trying to look like someone who has suffered.
One is “this understands me.”
The other is “I want people to think this understands me.”
And the internet makes that distinction even harder.
Everything has an aesthetic now.
There's an aesthetic for being happy.
An aesthetic for being sad.
An aesthetic for being mentally exhausted.
An aesthetic for being mysterious.
An aesthetic for having a messy bedroom.
You can literally make a Pinterest board called “romanticising my suffering” and get 47,000 images of girls staring out windows.
But I don't think that means all of it is fake.
I think sometimes making something beautiful out of a shitty feeling is actually how you survive it.
Maybe that's why I'm so attracted to fucked-up art in the first place.
I like things that are uncomfortable.
Music that sounds angry. Movies that leave me confused. Books where everyone makes terrible decisions. Characters who are lonely or obsessive or completely disconnected from everyone around them.
Maybe I'm not actually attracted to misery.
Maybe I'm attracted to people trying to find meaning inside it.
Because that's what art does.
It takes something horrible and says:
look at this.
Not necessarily look how beautiful this is.
Just: look.
And maybe that's enough.
Anyway, I'm going to go listen to some shit music now.
So I guess I've learned absolutely nothing.
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