a curriculum review of the desire to be sad

Tuesday, January 6th, 2026

happy tuesday dear readers!

we are chugging right along on this mar’s day.

mars is often associated with desire and assertion. one of my enduring desires is not power or dominance, but comprehension—the need to understand why we suffer, and why we sometimes learn to love it.
it was this desire that led me to setting up my own video essay curriculum which i will be sharing with you as 2026 progresses. today’s tea is english breakfast. so brew a cup, and join me for a curriculum review.

Trigger Warning for more sensitive readers.

This weeks Curriculum Review touches on subjects of mental illness, romanticizing self-harm, suicide, and other darker topics. Reader discretion is advised. If this subject matter isn’t accessible for you right now, this entry can be returned to later.

this week’s essay comes from youtuber olisunvia: the desire to be sad: “tragically beautiful” art and the romanticization of mental illness. it covers a topic uncomfortably close to me.

i was a melancholic child. i romanticized my misery, and over time that romanticization grew into a desire to end my own life—an action that, had it succeeded, would have been permanent, and would have prevented me from writing this newsletter at all.

that thought still stops me cold.

before i turned eighteen, i survived multiple suicide attempts—more than i can count without pausing.

and that did not include the decade that i spent selfharming before the age of eighteen. all twelve of those attempts where ridiculously thwarted by the universe. i say this with good humor despite it been so sad because when i reflect on this time in my life i see how much of an overreaction younger me was having to some very human circumstances. that even down to the ways in which i tried to end my own life it was cartoonishly bad.

in one attempt, i tried to drown myself using stones i believed would pull me under. they floated. so did i.

every attempt was like that—absurd in hindsight, devastating in the moment. at the time, it felt humiliating to survive myself. each failure reinforced the belief that i couldn’t even disappear correctly. survival didn’t feel like a gift; it felt like being trapped in a body that refused to cooperate with my despair.

what i understand now is that despair doesn’t actually want death—it wants relief. but when you’re young, without language or context, that distinction is impossible to see. you mistake intensity for truth. you mistake permanence for peace. and you mistake suffering for identity, because at least identity gives the pain a shape you can recognize.

i share this because i think its important for others to know that no matter how wonderful a person may seem when you meet them. you never know who they are and where they are coming from. i may seem healed and all together now but that is not how i always was. i struggle with that everyday. not because i am ashamed of where i was but because in some ways i am coming to terms with where i am now.

which brings us to the root of today’s essay—not as an abstract thought experiment, but as a lived question with real consequences. when sadness is aestheticized, shared, praised, and repeated, does it remain an expression of pain? or does it become a system that feeds on itself, rewarding sorrow with attention, meaning, and belonging?

in other words:

does the expression of sadness create a cycle of consumption that begets more sadness?

olisunvia situates this question within the rise of the “tumblr girl,” a figure also explored in mina le’s the tumblr girl is back. tumblr didn’t invent sadness, but it gave it a visual language: washed-out photos, cigarette smoke, smudged eyeliner, poetry about dying young. pain became curated. vulnerability became stylized. suffering became legible—and therefore shareable.

for many young people, this was the first time their internal world felt reflected anywhere. but reflection quickly turned into replication. sadness shifted from an experience into a performance—something displayed, refined, and rewarded. the aesthetic rewarded visibility, not healing. and visibility, especially online, has a way of turning pain into proof of depth.

so the ethical question emerges:
if art aestheticizes suffering and mental illness, is it moral to create it?

as a clinically depressed artist, i found this question thorny. i often include my own mental illness in my work—not to glorify it, but because articulating pain makes it more manageable. art gives language to what otherwise festers. it helps me, and it helps others communicate what they’re experiencing.

but what about those who don’t understand the pain—only the aesthetic?

that subset is the heart of this conversation: people who imitate suffering to belong, who perform sadness because it signals depth, intelligence, desirability. tragedy becomes social currency.

here, olisunvia invokes nietzsche’s on the genealogy of morality. nietzsche examines the pleasure of doing harm, and olisunvia reframes this as the pleasure of being sad.

it begins with the logic of equivalence: if you hurt me, i may hurt you. civilization requires us to suppress that instinct. but the desire doesn’t vanish—it turns inward. sadism becomes masochism. harm becomes virtue.

in this framework, suffering acquires moral value. especially when tied to wealthlessness, marginalization, or struggle, pain becomes proof of goodness. endless suffering demands meaning—and meaning makes the suffering feel justified.

“if there is meaning behind my suffering,” the logic goes, “then i have purpose. i am chosen.”

damage becomes acceptable when it arrives with meaning. tragedy becomes desirable because it promises depth. and so the stereotype of the tragic artist is born.

but pain is just pain. it doesn’t make anyone more worthy. you were never unworthy to begin with.

the danger lies in how this belief alters creative language. it warps catharsis into performance. it attracts those who mistake suffering for substance—and, in extreme cases, it can push artists toward irreversible decisions in pursuit of meaning.

this isn’t art’s fault. art itself is amoral. meaning is assigned by the viewer. but ethical engagement with art requires literacy—context, nuance, and responsibility. harm done by creators cannot be excused by aesthetics alone.

so in this wealthlessness the suffering seems endless until meaning arrives. meaning is made as a way to deal with the loss of worth and purpose. meaning becomes a coping mechanism. when worth is stripped away—by poverty, illness, marginalization, or neglect—meaning rushes in to fill the gap. suffering is reframed as destiny. endurance becomes virtue. pain is no longer random; it is earned, earned, earned.

nietzsche argues that humans can endure nearly anything if suffering is given meaning. the danger begins when meaning becomes dependent on continued pain. but this is where the trap snaps shut. when suffering becomes the source of meaning, there is no incentive to leave it behind. healing threatens identity. peace feels empty. and joy becomes suspicious—something reserved for people who haven’t “earned” it.

this is how sadness transforms from an experience into a value system.

this is the danger of mistaking endurance for enlightenment. when sadness becomes a value system, it teaches us not how to heal, but how to remain legible within suffering. pain stops being something we move through and becomes something we must protect, because abandoning it feels like erasing the self that was built around it. in this framework, growth is misread as betrayal, and relief feels unearned—almost fraudulent. the culture doesn’t demand this consciously, but it rewards it subtly, through attention, admiration, and belonging. over time, the question shifts from how do i get better to how do i stay meaningful.

literacy—in art, in philosophy, in emotional language—is how we keep ourselves from confusing pain with purpose. it’s how we honor suffering without worshiping it. art can hold grief without glorifying destruction, but only if we learn how to read it with care.

survival doesn’t make anyone exceptional.

living was never a reward for suffering.
it was always the point.

until next time,
hues