Just imagine, a girl posting a selfie while crying with perfect lighting and a caption like ‘healing but still hurting’. Is this normal? Does real pain look like this? Or is it just for attention? Social media has ‘aestheticised’ pain, glorifying and showcasing it in a very visually appealing manner rather than in its raw form. It shifts the focus from how the pain feels to how it looks.
The rise of content creation has made everything a part of content to the extent that pain is scripted, edited and then posted as relatable videos. The emotions created attract engagement and become a part of the aesthetic.
To make the aesthetics, the online platforms use dim lights, warm tone, and backgrounds like empty roads, night sky, and take shots which are cinematic and slow motioned, pairing with lo-fi tracks and poetic script.
Social media works on algorithms, and its job is to validate; therefore, social media will boost relatable content with engagement being the aim because people want their emotions to be seen, heard and acknowledged.
The validation they get from ‘friends’ online establishes the worth of their feelings. But in reality, pain is messy, confusing and chaotic; editing it causes a sense of control over the real feelings and switches to something structured that makes the pain feel more manageable.
Slowly, pain has started to be associated with identities like ‘healing era’, ‘sad girl aesthetic’, etc. and moved from private expression to public performance.
Influence of pop culture and media
Art, literature, and cinema have always merged pain with beauty. Across generations, people have been inspired by those who chose to sell pain as romantic gestures. The only shift social media brought is that now people can create their own style of ‘aesthetic pain’.
Films like Saiyaara, Aashiqui, Raanjhanaa, and Ae Dil Hai Mushkil show intense love in the form of heartbreak and suffering through cinematic shots and music and people got attracted to the struggles, but deep down, all these films just showed what toxicity is.
The genres like indie music, which is shared as nostalgic with night drives, rain and empty rooms. Artists like Billie Eilish are popular for these aesthetics. The playlists are also titled with some poetic captions, but in reality, while in pain, people crave for help and maybe someone to express their feelings and not relatable songs.
What is the main problem?
The performance of pain on social media transforms emotional suffering into aesthetic content where the pressure to look ‘beautifully broken’ drives engagement at the cost of authenticity.
This performative depression masks real struggles behind staged, high-engagement imagery, over genuine mental health challenges.
In the race of ‘beautiful even when broken’, people have forgotten to pause for a while and dive into what they actually feel from inside. This has created a standard of accepting sadness rather than working on it.
The concept of ‘relatable content’ is turning people into questioning themselves, creating insecurities and self-doubt. They are forcing themselves to match the pain shown and creating a comparison culture when their healing process doesn’t align. This is increasing the feeling of pain into mental health issues.
This is also harming the creators as the constant pressure of content is distancing them from real feelings as they focus is on audience reaction.
The line between Expression and Performance is very thin
Expressions are not always fake or attention-seeking; sometimes, the pain people communicate is what they genuinely feel in the form of visuals and words. For some, posting or creating visuals helps them process their emotions and feel therapeutic.
History has always portrayed creativity inspired by pain. It has become a belief that art emerges from personal struggles; online content can be seen as an extension of tradition.
But this expression starts becoming performative when the content’s aim is for likes and reach. Emotions are then sold for engagement. It becomes hard to differentiate between real expression and performance. We must share to heal and not to be seen.
How it impacts audience
The pain that’s aestheticised doesn’t affect the creator alone but shapes how the audience understands and feels. They start romanticising sadness and glorifying heartbreak and loneliness.
After a point, real pain feels less sensitive, and the basic empathy decreases among people, creating unrealistic expectations of healing and creating self-doubt and internal pressure to perform.
Views expressed by the author are their own.
