We make sad art.

We are trained to make sad art. Even if we don’t want to, we are trained to make sad art. We are told it is worthless without this sadness. The sadness is the point of the art, and it is communicated through the aesthetics. We have been taught that this is what people like; this is what people respond to. We have been taught how to manipulate these emotions, how to layer them, how to build them, how to destroy them and then rebuild them in new and interesting ways. And then we call ourselves artists.

The trouble is that no one cares about our sadness. This isn’t news: people have been saying it for years, but we know it’s true because no one listens to our music or watches our movies or reads our books or comes to our plays or looks at our drawings except when they’re paying us. We are masters at manipulating our own emotions; we know exactly what notes of self-pity will tug at our heartstrings most effectively; we know which moments will evoke the strongest sense of longing and loss; but all of it is for nothing because none of it means anything to anyone else. They do not care about the things that matter to us; they do not understand the things

We make sad art. We write songs that sound like they’re about missing someone, but they’re really about the opposite. We paint pictures of people on the beach. We make movies about people who are dying and then we cut to a shot of someone’s eyes opening.

We do this because we want to be noticed. Our work is a form of hunting or fishing. We throw it into the ocean and see if it attracts any fish. If not, we try again with something else, perhaps something brighter or more sparkly.

Trying to fish with sadness is dangerous though, because there are sharks in the water who don’t like being fished with. They’ll tell you that you’re a bad artist if you’re sadder than they are, or a bad person if you enjoy your sadness more than they do, or maybe just a bad person for making them feel sad at all.

Because when we catch ourselves thinking something terrible, we need to think of exactly what went wrong in our thinking so that we can edit our thoughts before anyone else sees them.

Thus far I’ve written three posts on this blog and they have been “The Hardest Part” “When Things Get Better” and “I’m Going To Be Okay”. Each post was

I’d been making sad art for a long time when I discovered that I wasn’t the only one. There were other people out there who were trying to make sad art, and who knew about it.

I’d heard the term “sad art” before, but I didn’t really understand it until I started looking for sad art blogs. The blogs I found weren’t things like mine– they weren’t made by depressed people trying to express their pain. They were made by non-depressed people who had realized that what they made often came out sad.

The reason they hadn’t figured this out before was that they hadn’t looked at their own work critically enough. They had just accepted the natural assumption that if you write a blog post or a story then it’s going to be about something happy and upbeat.

The main thing we do differently from other artists is that we are aware of our tendency to make sad art, and we try not to let ourselves get away with it. If someone asks us how we’re doing, and we can tell he doesn’t want to hear about how bad we feel, we don’t say “Fine” even though that’s what we meant. We say something honest instead, like “Not great.”

The difficulty that the majority of people have understanding art is not because they lack an aesthetic sense. It’s because they do not possess the isolation and detachment necessary for appreciating art.

Art is about being alone, separated from others. It is, in this way, a separate and solitary act. Those who are not capable of such isolation and detachment will never be able to understand it.

Making sad art requires a separation from other human beings so profound that you cannot even understand that they are suffering as well. And if you cannot understand their suffering–if you have no empathy–you can be nothing but sad when confronted with it.

But I am getting ahead of myself, talking about making sad art before I explain why we make sad art. To talk about why we make sad art, I must first explain what art is.*

If we are constantly making art about how lonely it is to make sad art, then how do we manage to make any sad art? Do we just talk about our sadness all the time?

The answer is no. We talk about our sadness sometimes; but if we only ever talked about it, then we wouldn’t have any sadness left to feel.

This suggests a possible solution for this problem: We could stop talking about sad art so much and start making more of it. That would mean that the more time we spent doing those things, the less time we spent talking about them, and therefore the more time we had in which to be sad.

But maybe there is a reason why that strategy doesn’t seem to be working very well. Maybe they’re not actually different things. Maybe all that time we spend talking about making sad art is actually part of the process of making it.

Since most people have the overwhelming urge to write a happy story, I thought I’d take the time to try and explain why humans tend to create sad art.

The first reason is that writing something terrible is a lot more fun than writing something good. Everyone likes to write about their own misery, which only makes sense, because it’s all you’ve got. The fact that so much of our art comes from people who are going through a bad time in their lives really supports this.

We make sad art because we can’t help ourselves, because it’s so hard for us to keep from spilling all of our secrets onto the page. It’s almost easier when we’re happy. When you’re miserable, the whole world is right there at your fingertips, but when you’re happy or content, all you can see is what everyone else sees. You have trouble grasping how anyone could be anything other than happy or content, and your observations from this perspective seem trite and boring. But when you’re suffering, everything looks different to you then it does to everyone else- like you’ve got some kind of secret keyhole into existence that no one else can see, and if only someone would listen to your tale…

You’ve probably heard this before: “Write what

Last year, when I turned forty, I decided to take stock of my life and start making some changes. I took up smoking again. I got a new tattoo. And I started writing about sad art.

I’m not going to tell you my real name or what I do for a living because this is not really about me. It’s about the art we’re all making together and how it can be better.

I’ve been writing on the Internet for over twenty years now. In that time, I’ve watched it change from an obscure hobby to a global media empire, watched the mid-90s webcomic boom collapse into a steaming heap of crushed dreams, watched the rise and fall of blogging, watched the rise and fall of social media. To say nothing of getting older and watching my friends die.

In short, it’s been a long time since I had much in the way of fresh ideas. So if there’s anything you read here that seems like fun or useful information, thank some other writer for that part. This is just me trying to figure out what kind of art I can make with what tools are left over from a life spent in front of the computer screen.”