Each morning, a girl in Suriname, South America wakes up, opens up her laptop and taps ‘im not crying theres just a bit of homework in my eye’ into Twitter. Or maybe she’s copied and pasted it from someone else’s Tumblr. Whatever. She presses enter and within minutes it’s been faved by girls in Chicago, a boy in Brazil, a student in Maine and a South African emo. Before long it’s got 4,400 retweets and 8,100 favourites. Both are set to rise. Because 15-year-old Nikita (she won’t give out her surname, but her email signature says ‘Kimberley Kardashian’) along with 18-year-old Californian Georgina are otherwise known as @girlposts, with 4,890,000+ followers enjoying and co-signing their bon mots. And they're part of a cabal of high-profile Twitter accounts using pop culture references, observational jokes about the drabness of school, a pinch of righteousness and buckets of sadness to destroy the idea you need to be happy all the fucking time.
@SoSadToday (‘one fun thing to do is be constantly disappointed’) has 148,000 followers. @relatablequote (‘all i want in life is to lose weight and gain money yet instead, here i am, gaining weight and losing money’) has 2.86m. There’s online artist @mollysoda, with 17,200 followers tweeting stuff like: ‘i like it when friends message me asking if i'm okay cause my social media posts seem really sad. i'm fine i just have a lot of feelings.’ And her artist friend Brittney Scott (8,700 followers) who recently shared: ‘feelings hurt my feelings’. This isn’t just one or two people expressing their melancholy. It's a sadness that's trickling down the strata of Twitter users like salty tears across pubescent cheeks. It's a full-on celebration of sadness, and everyone’s invited.
‘Everyone has to go through sadness, it’s part of reality,’ says Arlind, who runs @relatablequote: ‘I believe retweeting a tweet is a way of people expressing their feelings.’ Nikita agrees: ‘I think everyone is looking for something they can relate to. It can make us happy or sad, but sometimes that’s all some people need; a laugh…or to know they’re not alone.’ And Melissa, the twenty-something behind @sosadtoday, which is, as its name suggests, entirely sad tweets, backs this up: ‘I think maybe my own disappointment with reality is probably something that a lot of people can identify with.’
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While Nikita started her account as ‘a Justin Bieber fanpage’ and Arlind’s was started with the intention ‘to overcome [a friend’s] number of followers’ in spring 2010, fully-fledged misery arrived in 2012, when Melissa set up @sosadtoday with a whole load of sad imagery, mock-aphorisms borrowed from Tumblr accounts to be-reposted, slap-dash DIY annotations on images of celebrities (like a speeded up micro-fanzine). Gradually their followers started to grow, and the Sad Internet was born.
So why the sudden surge? ‘I started using Twitter I was at a very low, sad point in my life and I guess I found this pocket of Twitter that celebrated that and that's just what came out,’ Annabelle Nyst, a 24-year-old from New York who’s got 4,700 followers and tweets stuff that's ‘sad but in a trendy way’, tells The Debrief. ‘I can’t understand what [other people’s] happiness feels like, but sadness is so basic – it’s a basic truth. Not everyone has ever felt true happiness, but we’ve all felt true sadness.’
She adds: ‘It goes hand-in-hand with a rebellion against pop culture, a movement away from tradition and towards individual freedom, for women specifically rebelling against what is expected of us. My reaction to Pharrell bringing out Happy was "That's great that you're happy, most of us are depressed, fuck you."’
Millennials' experience of pop culture is pinpointed with moments of female distress.
‘I added an email onto my Twitter bio so if people ever want to write things on there, they can. I really enjoy engaging with people, it’s really fun,’ Melissa tells us, before adding: ‘From talking about my own depression some people think I’m equipped to handle theirs. With those kinds of emails, I refer them to a professional.’
Part of the Sad Internet’s success is it perpetuates the idea of being not-quite perfect – one that’s been, post-Girls, recognised by marketers, bought up and glossed over for sale to young consumers. But they don’t always fall for for the everyday-ness of Taylor Swift (she pretends to fall out of step, but she’s a multi-millionaire pop singer) and the put-on down-to-earthiness of One Direction (again, millionaires). As one Sad Interneter put it: ‘Hey One Direction the problem Is that no one care about my “little things.”’
Instead, the Sad Internet’s celebrity cornerstones are Lindsay, Kim, Paris and Britney. Crying in public, if possible.
Not in a mean way, though. It's just that Millennials are of a generation where pop culture is pinpointed with moments of female distress. Instead of seeing the upward trajectory of women in the public eye, or even knowing what some celebrities are famous for in the first place, young women have been saturated with images of others' downfalls; their flaws, faults and fuckups. Instead of letting this get to them, Millennials seem to be reclaiming the saddest moments for their own. Take, for example, that aphorism: ‘If Britney Spears could get through 2007, I can get through today.’
Not only is the Sad Internet giving Millennial girls something real by relaying their own sadness back to them, but it helps them to take ownership of the feminised sadness that’s been used to tarnish the reputation of so many women they look up to.
And the Sad Internet is filtering through the internet to more traditional media: Sam Smith’s Stay With Me, a song about being left by a one night stand, has gone to number one in 12 countries and platinum in 7. The Fault In Our Stars, a film about a teenage relationship in the face of terminal cancer, grossed $303m (£189m) worldwide this autumn. And on Sundays, Radio 1’s Annie Mac hosts a three-hour long chillout session called the #musicalhotwaterbottle where listeners are not only encouraged to heal themselves following a weekend of hedonism (she also presents the Friday night warm-up show of house, drum n’ bass and EDM), but fully envelope themselves in melancholy. ‘If you’re feeling very sorry for yourself, we’ve got the thing for you. It’s the self-pity party’ she imparts in soothing husky tones, encouraging people to tweet in their stories of weekend woe with the hashtag #selfpityparty.
But where it would be easy to misread the Sad Internet as a dangerous reflection of how tortured today’s teens and young women are - you can envisage the headlines right now, right? – that would miss the point of this gallows humour approach of dealing with life’s shittiness.
Psychologists argue that this choir of sadness is actually anything but – because being part of such a tight-knit community can be a positive thing
‘In the times of Myspace and Tumblr there was a really dark scene, but right now I feel that is just a very light sadness. Like, we are aware that we sad, we’re not going to kill ourselves,’ says Brittney Scott, who makes sad art on her iPad off the back of commissions from her followers. ‘I don’t take the internet seriously, there are a lot of real things online but everything that I put out there is very light hearted, I mean most of what I say but also it doesn’t have to be taken that seriously.’
In fact, some psychologists argue that this choir of sadness is actually anything but – because being part of such a tight-knit community can be a positive thing.‘From a health perspective, the more people disclosing these negative things, the less unwell they feel. If you discuss emotions it acts as a buffer against becoming more prevailing ill,’ says psychologist Dr Simon Moore, who specialises in consumer behaviour: ‘Anything you can connect with people and communicate socially with people is a good thing because you don’t feel so isolated. Most people don’t do things to get stress or to feel a negative emotion- I expect their reward is “I’m getting this off my chest, I feel normal” or “I can see this and get reassurance.”’
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It’s little wonder the Sad Internet’s community is growing bigger. Through retweets from avid celebrity followers like Paris Hilton, Katy Perry, Sky Ferreira, Miley Cyrus, and, um, Cher (who at least keeps up with the Sad Internet with regards to lax grammar), and wider appreciation from people way outside of the supposed demographic, there’s a universality to sadness. You might be a bit too old to have watched Spongebob Squarepants growing up, or have your mum nagging you to do chores, but you get it when you see a photo of him looking stressed out along with the caption ‘when your mom is yelling at you to do more chores while you’re doing chores and you’re there like’
When you think about the wider context, it make sense. With adulthood stalled for so many of the older Millenials, quarter-life crises tearing through what Friends promised would be the time of our lives (everything except the theme tune was pretty breezy), and consistent backlashes against any attempt at gaining women’s empowerment, we’re all sosadtoday. But we've got each other, and that's ok.
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Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
Image: Brittney Scott
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.