My feed is full of people who romanticise sadness. Sad background music, melancholic reels, people turning emotional pain into something poetic. At first, it feels like a nice way to sit with the thoughts we were always taught to suppress. But is there a limit to it? Does watching content that glorifies mental illness actually help us heal, or has it just become another way to avoid dealing with it? To suffer and let it consume you. To romanticise so much that you forget how to be happy in the first place. It starts with finding a community where your pain is validated, even celebrated. Suddenly, your anxiety is aesthetic. Your depression is relatable. Your eating disorder is just another vibe in a curated feed. And in that space, you stop looking for a way out because now your suffering feels like part of your identity. It’s become a form of art. But art was meant to reveal truth.
Now, especially on social media, it often turns war, poverty, and trauma into beautiful edits: easy to consume, easy to forget. And behind every perfectly filtered tragedy is a person, quietly erased. Somewhere between using art to express pain that words couldn’t hold and pain becoming content, something shifted. Eating disorders became a hashtag. Surviving on Mentos and Diet Coke became a lifestyle that teenagers felt pressured to copy. And now we live in a culture where grief, violence, and generational trauma aren’t processed; they’re stylised. They’re stripped of context, scrubbed of politics, and made just pretty enough to repost.
But suffering isn’t a trend. And art that disconnects pain from its reality doesn’t humanise; it erases. This culture of romanticising suffering costs more than we realise. Because someone else’s trauma should never be your aesthetic. My anxiety isn’t a trend. An eating disorder isn’t a weight loss plan. And the more we let suffering consume us, the more it takes from us.
Why do we glorify pain?
Is this glorification of pain something we created? No. This isn’t new; it’s inherited. For centuries, art has glamorised suffering, as if the more pain you’re in, the more authentic your work becomes.
Take Vincent van Gogh, who lived with mental illness, poverty, and isolation and famously cut off his own ear. But instead of treating that as a tragedy, we mythologised. His agony became part of his personality. Suddenly, you could dress up as Van Gogh and mimic the “no-ear” look like it was a Halloween costume. He was losing his mind while painting Starry Night, yet we rarely stop to ask what failed him. What support did he never receive? Instead, his story gets flattened into aesthetic tragedy, a cautionary tale that somehow feels beautiful.
The same thing happened with Sylvia Plath, whose depression made her poetry cut like a blade, especially in Ariel and The Bell Jar. Her work held sharp critiques of misogyny and the weight of being a woman in a patriarchal society, but people often skip past that. She’s remembered more for how she died than for what she wrote. The irony is painful. She’s become the poster girl for poetic sadness, but that’s not literary appreciation. It’s the commodification of her suffering.
The idea of aestheticism in gentle illness and pain convinces us that pain equals authenticity, but only if that pain is clean, distant, and palatable. This system rewards suffering only after it becomes beautiful enough to post. Add a Radiohead song in the background, and you’ve got pain rebranded as art. It disconnects art from activism. It asks us to feel the emotion without questioning why it exists.
The myth of the “tortured artist” told us that great work must come from misery, but let’s be honest: most of the artists we’ve romanticised came from privilege. They had the freedom to explore their emotions because their lives weren’t under constant threat. And now, my logic shows up on social media. The aesthetic may have changed, but the core belief hasn’t. We still think pain has to mean something to be worthy of attention, but that’s a lie we inherited. One that lets people turn someone else’s trauma into a trending topic and get praised for it, without ever asking: what caused this pain in the first place?
Sadness sells, and that’s a problem
There are so many videos labelled as “third world sadness” on TikTok, all featuring the same soft background music and footage of children running through rubble or families walking past crumbling buildings in Syria, Gaza, or Afghanistan. The captions rarely mention the war, displacement, or systemic oppression; instead, they frame the images as “aesthetic vibes” or “poetic sadness”. In these edits, suffering is repurposed for likes, comments, and emotional clout.
The result is a passive consumption of trauma, as viewers admire the beauty of hardship without ever confronting the forces that created it. The focus shifts from systemic causes to the personal “vibe” of suffering. As a result, the people who consume media experience the illusion of empathy and the thrill of sadness, while the structural injustices remain unseen, unchallenged, and unaddressed. People feel “moved” for a few seconds but never act or understand the systemic oppression behind it.
The thesis is simple. When art (and “content”) repackages trauma as aesthetic, audiences feel briefly moved but learn nothing and do nothing, and the people depicted are effectively erased. Susan Sontag warned that spectatorship can numb rather than mobilise; compassion withers if it isn’t translated into action.
Who profits vs. who suffers:
As the ABBA lyric goes, “The winner takes it all; the loser has to fall.” In the current economy of aestheticised pain, this has become somewhat of a reality. The winners are the influencers and brands that convert other people’s wounds into reach, reputation, and revenue. The losers are the subjects of those images and stories. They are people for whom the subject isn’t a metaphor or a mood board; it’s Tuesday.
Who wins? First, the institutions that award prestige and profit to “edgy” work. Publishers that package trauma as a mood, galleries that sell grief in a painting, and platforms that convert pain into clicks. Then come the artists who treat hardship they have never lived as atmospheric shorthand, poverty as a vintage filter, war as a metaphor and illness as a brand of death. Their audience reads “authenticity”, but what’s often authenticated is taste.
Who loses? The subjects, real communities and real bodies, vanish behind the “vibe”. Once pain is flattened into aesthetics, the messy context that gives it meaning, like policy, history and power, falls away. Suffering becomes decorative, not diagnostic. We learn nothing about the state, the supply chain, or the border, only that sorrow is captured well. This isn’t an argument against depicting pain. Depiction is necessary, but exploitation is optional.
The test is simple: Does the work restore context, share agency and return something to the people it draws from? Or does it strip context, seize voice, and convert attention into clout or cash? A prize-winning poem about “torn shoes” and “hunger” that never names causes or credits sources is just misdirection. A film shoot in a derelict neighbourhood that never hires locally or cites history is not a critique; it’s a set. If art claims the right to the borrowed suffering, it inherits the duty to answer for it. Otherwise, ABBA’s line holds: the winners keep the stage lights; the losers, once again, are asked to fall. Quietly, beautifully, and out of frame.
What this costs us (art without accountability)
When suffering is turned into an aesthetic, it doesn’t soften the world; rather, it hardens us. The never-ending, tragic reels and trauma-induced poetry don’t make us care more; they make us scroll faster. The danger is subtle: pain becomes background noise. And in the process, the people behind those images disappear. The cost is not the numbness. It’s complicity.
Because when suffering becomes “beautiful”, it stops being urgent. War becomes poetic instead of political. Poverty becomes a vibe instead of an injustice. Depression becomes an accessory instead of an illness that kills. Art without accountability does not heal; it anaesthetises. It takes the raw wound of human pain and covers it with filters until we forget it ever bled; the systems responsible keep winning. Suffering should move us to action, not to likes. To empathy, not to aesthetics.
It desensitises. Psychology has a name for the way empathy drops as the numbers rise: “compassion fade” or “psychic numbing”. We respond intensely to one identifiable victim, then go numb as suffering scales. Endless aesthetic tragedy accelerates the numbing; we scroll past sorrow because we’ve been trained to.
It misinforms. When algorithms favour resonance over rigour, trauma gets flattened into bite-sized takes. Misleading mental-health clips, uncontextualised war footage, and poverty-as-mood boards prime audiences to feel without thinking to perform empathy rather than practise it.
It erases agency. People become props. Context, policy, history, and power fall away. Pain is rendered decorative, not diagnostic. Sontag’s point lands here: images of suffering demand interpretation and responsibility, not passive consumption.
What art should do instead:
Art doesn’t have to romanticise pain to be powerful. In fact, the most striking art is the kind that refuses to turn suffering into decoration but rather insists on showing the truth. That truth begins with lived experience. When someone who has survived war, poverty, or oppression creates art from their own life, it isn’t voyeurism. It’s testimony. A Palestinian filmmaker documenting bombed streets, or a Black poet tracing generational grief, doesn’t flatten suffering into an aesthetic; instead, they transform it into resistance. That difference is everything.
Art with integrity also refuses to strip away context. A photograph of a hungry child is not beautiful because of their hollow eyes; rather, it’s devastating because it points to systems of neglect and inequality. Context takes pain out of the realm of “aesthetic mood” and puts it back where it belongs, in the realm of politics, justice, and accountability. Equally important is collaboration. If an artist wants to portray someone else’s struggle, the ethical choice is to involve those voices directly, to let them speak instead of speaking over them. Otherwise, it’s just appropriation with a filter. And finally, art must embrace complexity. Suffering isn’t neat or poetic; it is messy, contradictory, and layered with resilience, humour, and survival. To capture only the tragedy is to flatten humanity into cliché.
Because at the end of the day, accountability is what separates exploitation from expression. Every artist must ask: Who am I speaking for? Am I making suffering visible, or am I making it consumable? The world doesn’t need more pretty pictures of pain. It needs art that names its causes, honours its survivors, and refuses to make oppression look palatable. That is the kind of art that doesn’t just move people. It moves them to act.
A Challenge to Creators and Readers:
Art should never strip suffering of its truth. If you create, create with care. If you watch, watch with awareness. If you read, read with responsibility. Because every “aesthetic” image of pain comes from someone’s real life.
And to viewers that consume everything: the more conscious you are of what you are consuming, the less likely you are to be consumed by it.
Stop making trauma beautiful. Start making it matter.