The melancholic trap
We’ve created a quiet religion of suffering
If you spend even a few minutes on Instagram, Youtube, or Tiktok, a clear emotional tone emerges. Everything feels lighthearted. Fun. Digestible. It might feature Clash Royale memes and Adam Killa dancing at the St. George campus. A performative male with a matcha proclaiming his undying respect for women.
This might not even be relevant to you, but the trend of meme-fication is the same, regardless. Everything is playful, silly, trivial, and surface level—it’s a happy distraction, something we look at, smirk at, and scroll past. And when something heavier does appear—because it always does—it’s filtered through layers of irony. The music is funny or otherwise exaggerated. The caption uses meme-speak—“me when”, “the lion doesn’t,” or greentext—and references to do with faulty relationships, bad grades, or other sources of insecurity. Depth like this almost exclusively appears when connected to something of pain, and only when wrapped behind humor.
On social media, personal struggle is acceptable, but only when it is aesthetic, performative, and plausibly deniable as a joke. What we’re left with is a digital culture where joy is shallow, and sadness—so long as it is stylized—is the only thing allowed to feel real. Though this dynamic may not seem like a big deal, its hegemonic grip over digital culture is exactly where our problem begins. What we see online isn’t just a mirror, it’s also a script that teaches us how to feel, and what feelings are valuable.
Across the endless scroll, happiness is rarely displayed as something deep or fulfilling. It’s a punchline, a gag, a transitory blip. We are taught that happiness must be sought out, while sadness is what remains when we are alone, stationary, and unoccupied; what we experience when we are alone with our thoughts.
Happiness is portrayed through the models of fun, silliness, thrill, and excitement, and thus temporary, while sadness is grief, self-contempt, heartbreak, and failure, and thus permanent: everpresent. Over time, we internalize this logic. Sadness begins to feel more authentic than happiness, more real. And nowhere is this clearer than in the archetypes of masculinity that dominate online spaces.
In online subcultures like the redpill, blackpill, inceldom, and toxic fitness communities, a single script repeats itself with dogmatic consistency: happiness is overrated. Optimism is naive. Hope is a weakness. These spaces revere deeply broken men as moral exemplars and role models—not in spite of their suffering, but precisely because of it. Men like Guts (Berserk), Patrick Bateman, Tyler Durden, and Ryan Gosling’s sad-eyed cast, are each idolized as admirably tragic figures who have “understood” life.
According to these archetypes, to be happy with life is to be blind or sheltered from reality. Emotional torment is not a problem to overcome, but a rite of passage, and an indication of maturity. Something that, if endured stoically and without complaint, signals insight and strength. The more broken you are, the more admirable you become; so long as you endure. This may come from a romanticization of sadness, or a disillusionment with the possibility of happiness altogether.
But, it also stems from something simpler: a learned belief, endlessly reinforced on social media, that joy is childish, or worse, feminine. True masculine maturity is imagined as suffering: grinding, enduring, hiding behind a stoic mask. Even Bateman, who smiles, socialises, and laughs, does so with a deadness in his eyes; and that contradiction is the point. He performs normalcy like a role, and in this perverted culture, that mask is the masculine ideal.
Of course, there is nothing new or inherently unnatural about performance.
Most people, in most social situations, are always acting. We shape our tone, fake a laugh, compete—subtly—for a preferable place within the friend group. It’s a natural part of living in the social world. Yet digital culture has exaggerated this instinct to an unhealthy extreme. It reinforces this mode of being perpetually through constant repetition, becoming what French sociologist Jean Baudrillard called a hyperreality.
This nature repeats ad nauseum, and exaggerates itself: TV characters try harder to fit in than real people ever would, and the polarity between their pretend and real selves becomes laughably extreme. We see it in Kendall Roy in Succession, Joe Goldberg in You, and both Rue and Nate from Euphoria; but countless other examples exist. This dynamic—the widening gap between our performed and authentic self—has already been widely discussed in other places. But what makes this situation uniquely damaging is how this structure collides with the emerging emotional tropes of our culture.
Through the perverse categorization of emotions glamorized on social media—joy as temporary facade and sadness as permanent depth— we begin to believe that our authentic selves must be hollow, wounded, or unwell; and begin to think it is inescapably so. We not only become distant from the actor we present to the world, we come to assume that what lies behind our mask must necessarily be broken. This creates not only a pathos of performance, but a pathos of emotion, between our real and social selves. Over time, this assumption becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
The more we consume and reproduce this emotional script, the more real it becomes. The performance of sadness hardens into sincerity, and the culture’s distorted model of feeling becomes our own. We learn to inhabit our misery as though it were truth, and to mistake the endurance of that perversion as depth of character. In doing so, we trap ourselves in a sick emotional loop—alienated not only from happiness, but from the very possibility of it—taught to believe that our pain is both inevitable and somehow noble.
We’ve created a quiet religion of suffering.
The man who smiles is a fool; the man who suffers, a philosopher. Sadness isn’t our virtue, but our truth—and our value lies in bearing it. The poets we idolize—Kafka, Plath, Dazai, Dostoevsky—lived in agonising despair.
Perhaps the saddest thing is not that we feel this way, but that we think it’s all we can be.
