Sad Girls Smoke A Lot
- Suria Rai
- Nov 6, 2025
- 6 min read
I used to post about my sadness on Instagram like it was a ritual. A blurry photo filtered in black-and-white, a caption borrowed from a poem I barely understood, and ‘Iris’ by the Goo Goo Dolls to accompany a teary-eyed TikTok – all small offerings to the algorithm. It was as if the internet could somehow absorb the weight I couldn’t carry. I must admit, it felt strangely comforting in the moment. The way heartbreak seemed a little softer through a filter or the way loneliness sounded almost poetic when written in lowercase.
I didn’t realise it then, but I had unknowingly hopped onto the internet’s favourite trend of turning pain into something that could be seen, liked, related and maybe even admired. Oftentimes, scrolling through my Pinterest or Instagram feed felt like a walk through a gallery of curated heartbreak. Like somehow, I’ve managed to make pain melancholy photogenic.
So, why do we romanticise pain on the internet?
I don't think we necessarily enjoy feeling sad, though it's easy to believe that social media has made us obsessed with romanticising pain. We consume heartbreak, loneliness and grief the same way we do a beautifully shot film: stylised, softened, and meaningful. For instance, Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides (1999) captures this perfectly. The film turns the Lisbon sisters' quiet despair into something hauntingly beautiful, and it is that their sadness is drenched in golden light, framed by nostalgic suburbia, and narrated through the longing gaze of neighbourhood boys who can only imagine their inner lives.
What should feel tragic instead feels ethereal, so their pain becomes a kind of spectacle. A language of beauty we're compelled to look at. It's not that the film glorifies suffering, but it sort of renders it dreamlike, and in doing so, teaches viewers to see pain as something cinematic or even desirable. So when we encounter our own sadness, we've already absorbed this aesthetic – angle it towards the light, and we make it pretty enough to survive.
At its core, I think what drives us to romanticise our pain is also the desire to be seen. We have learned how to make sadness visible, simply because visibility feels like validation. With turning our suffering into something we can put a name to, something shapeable or even beautiful, we regain a sense of control over it. These days, if something isn’t posted online, it almost feels like it didn’t happen – in every meal, every milestone and every passing mood, all of what we do must be recorded or society will risk fading into digital oblivion. Which is why we tend to translate our emotions into posts and captions. Because behind all the hashtags and quotes, it screams:
I feel deeply. I’m real and I’m still here.
Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Tumblr and X have played a big role in successfully turning our emotional lives into visual language. Let’s say, a simple crying video set to a trending sound (I’m looking at you Sad Tok) or a melancholic caption under a sunset or a quote reposted from someone else’s heartbreak that somehow feels like our own or creating lo-fi playlists titled “heartbreak season”. Dare I say that we aren’t just seeking sympathy when we post about our pain; we’re seeking validation that what we feel matters to someone.
And that’s okay.
However, somewhere along the way, pain becomes a brand. From the Tumblr sadgirl/sadboy era of cigarette-smoked poetry to TikTok clips of crying girls mouthing Lana Del Rey lyrics, I fear that pain has become nothing less of an aesthetic. The heartbreak that once felt unbearable becomes a carefully composed post. The anxiety that once kept us up at night becomes a lyric. A quote. A moodboard. It’s true we can’t always manage our emotions, but we can decide how they look – and what other healthier way is there to deal with our emotions when we refuse to talk about it?
There is also something quietly reforming about showing sadness in a culture that demands happiness, productivity and perfection. All the sad girl aesthetics, the #nobodyunderstandsme #sad #relatable #ifykyk memes, and the confessional Instagram stories reflects a yearning to be authentically human in a digital landscape that, more often than not, feels synthetic. It signals depth in a ForYou page of performance. Nowadays, to publicly express that you’re not okay on the internet is to push back against the expectations to always be thriving.
Still, there is a strange irony to it.
We tell ourselves that we’re being vulnerable, but at what point does it start to become performative? Seeing that, while the internet rewards emotional exposure, it unfortunately does not reward emotional evolution.
Sadness gets likes.
Desolation feels relatable.
Progression, on the other hand, never trends.
The world rarely claps for the mended. There’s no filter for peace, and so we remain where the attention is. We continue to glorify what’s broken, not what’s being restored. To continue to romanticise the pain long after we’ve outgrown it for the possible chance that we are, maybe, just afraid that moving on might make us less interesting. Less seen. Thus, we linger on the flavor of our own sorrow, tracing the rim of old wounds as if their sting were a kind of sweetness.
“We are all museums of fear,” wrote Charles Bukowski. Maybe that’s why we keep polishing our grief – arranging it like art, hoping others will admire how gracefully we’ve suffered. In time, the internet becomes our museum, where every post is an exhibit and every feeling is carefully curated.
I don’t post about my sadness as much anymore. Not because I’ve stopped feeling it, but because I’ve learned that not every emotion needs to be witnessed to be valid. It’s something the internet doesn’t tell us: pain does not need to be beautiful to be real. It doesn’t need to be edited, captioned, or understood by others to matter. Sometimes, the most honest thing you can do is to feel privately, to allow yourself and your pain to heal.
And when that moment comes, you’ll run your fingers over old scars and be startled by their softness, like warmth seeping in after a long winter.
That gentleness will be your proof.
Proof of your survival.
Proof that you were brave.
Proof that you’ve become whole again.
Writer's Notes:
I’ll admit I am guilty of posting my feelings on Instagram. At least I used to. As someone whose emotions can be regrettably overwhelming, and during a time where I felt like there was nowhere else to turn to. No shoulder I could cry on, no one I could trust. Pressing “Your Story” after carefully curating a quote that seemed to perfectly describe what I felt then, though nothing direct enough to give everything away, seemed like it was the only way I could lift some weight off my shoulders. That, and I was an incredibly cheesy teenager who knew nothing better. I suppose it was only fitting that I decided to take on writing this piece because it was interesting to examine the subtle ways we aestheticise suffering. We are all guilty of it. Thus, my choice in opening with a reflection on the strange comfort we find in sadness, and it’s not that we enjoy how it feels but that we’ve grown accustomed to seeing that feeling everywhere. In films, social media, even the stories we binge. Truthfully, Ryan Murphy’s MONSTERS came to mind, it’s a work that blurs the line between empathy and spectacle, between telling a story and aestheticising trauma and while I wasn’t interested in analysing that directly here (my editor said no), it lingered in the back of my mind as I wrote. Nevertheless, what fascinates me is how we’ve learned to frame sadness, share it, and in doing so, reclaim it. As for the fact that beneath that impulse lies something tender: to remind the world that we’re still here.
Writer's Biography:
Hi! I’m Suria, a final-year Creative Writing major who attempts to prove just how nonchalant she is behind every scenario she could possibly overthink of when thrown into a social setting. It’s a disease. I also indulge in the joys of movie screenings and dissecting it after, a good conversation, and food. After all, I’m but a simple man.
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