why sad literature always wins.
is it because sadness and gloom has somehow been made to appear superior than happiness? being associated with intelligent people, with sagacity and awareness of harsh truths unlike joy, quietly labelled as the emotion fitting for the blind that do not see the sadness of reality.
no, i do not think this is the only reason. this itself is so multifaceted. happiness is indeed a part of reality. a brightly coloured fragment of it, like sadness it a darkly coloured one.
sad literature, somber literature, heartbreaking literature always wins because it is a vulnerable emotion. you are not in a vulnerable state when you're happy, no. contrarily you're on top of the world! a little less afraid, a little less vulnerable. but sadnessβ it chips away at any sort of persona of glamour and good. it shows who you are deep within, and this is not to say deep down all of us are inherently sad people. rather, sadness speaks of our fears, of the obstacles within our journey whose way is up. the highest mountains feature the most difficult climb. sadness, it sheds light on that, on the roadblocks and ditches and gaps on what appears, to everyone else, a smooth climb.
no one wants to broach things that evoke sadness. it puts us in an unfavourable position of being known as the dark cloud in the room, always gloomy and heavy just waiting to unleash rain. but when we see it in literature, we read it devotedly. we seek it, no, we crave it. because we feel understood. it resonates with us and makes us feel like we're acknowledged despite not feeling and being at our best.
sadness, yes, has been exploited and made a trend out of in many ways on social media. it became the new norm for the teenagers, the young adults. but the years-old excerpts of sad literature we find online that, given their age, haven't jumped on the bandwagon of turning things to trends, are the outliers in the best way possible. they remind us that emotions aren't items to be converted into trends, to capture as a new way of being, but they speak to us over the course of months, decades, centuries, reminding us that we are easy to understand and relate to. even at our worst.
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