Are you looking for sadness?

A quick Google search using the keywords "sadness" and "art", leads one to stumble upon an article
titled "Sadness inspires great art..". It provokes the question of whether sadness truly inspires great art
in a way happiness doesn't or if we just tend to associate greatness with anything with a touch of
melancholy to it. How do we explain the human tendency to be so drawn to sadness, almost deriving
some kind of twisted joy from it? Simply put, it’s like a single person's process of seeking and watching
a sad romantic film, wanting to experience the happiness that romance brings, but perhaps looking
forward to the sadness that comes after just a little more.While everyone still seeks happiness on some
level, it is often disregarded as a simple-minded, almost monotonous emotion with a lack of depth
while sadness is somehow associated with maturity, complexity and strength. Sadness demands to be
felt.

History has been a testimony to this phenomenon of glorification. Van Gogh’s paintings did not turn
enough heads until they were associated with the misery of a man who sliced off his own ear and drank
yellow paint. And so is the case with many great works of the past and the present. In today's day and
age, a digital phenomenon can be observed where slightly more complex themes of mental disorders
have been been incorporated in memes, digital art and music. For a lot of people these pieces of
contemporary digital art are a way to cope or an outlet for emotions they otherwise do not want to
confront, while a lot of others are drawn to the relatability factor of these.

While it has opened up forums for conversations about otherwise stigmatized concepts, there is also
widespread commercialization of the trope of depression and anxiety in the form of glorified
misinterpretations, which unfortunately have more appeal and gain more traction, more quickly. T-
shirts with “Anxiety queen” printed on them, songs about being sad and sadness being wrongly self
diagnosed as depression are among the many things that trivializes and defeats the purpose of the
concept of destigmatization as a whole. The lines between feeling a little blue and serious mental
disorders have blurred and the average millennial who is already in the midst of a cultural crisis, trying
hard to fit in, while also stand out and have a story is the first to fall prey to all this.

From the ‘internet sad girls’ who gave rise to Lana Del Rey a decade ago to the ‘Sad boi’ trend now
involving lo-fi hip hop music and low depth vaporwave images, sadness has gone through a complete
re-branding and people are readily buying into the ‘aesthetics’ of it. It can only be hoped people can
look beyond the romanticism and realize that that the single saddest thing about the sadness trend is the
trend in itself.