Column by Zachary Strauss
I like sad music, sometimes a little too much. This isn’t limited to music about sad things; but music that sounds melancholy, or music I associate sadness with. Does liking sad music hurt me? I think it might. A depressed mood can be exacerbated by other things. For example, going for a drive while I’m feeling down and playing the new Whitney album, which is a pretty sad album, might make my mood worse in the short term but it does help in some ways in the long term.
People are wary to make it known that they are sad. If you walked around campus and looked around, odds are people would not be talking about unhappy things or talking about depressing things going on in their life, yet all people do get sad. We all have this desire to show a happy version of ourselves and to hide the negative feelings we experience, which isn’t a good thing. People like to know that other people feel the same things they do, as it makes them feel less lonely. Similarly, people dislike being around people who are emotionally distant from them. For example, if you come out of a movie, a depressing but really good movie, and everyone else is laughing and joking, it might undercut how you feel because there is seemingly no one else who agrees emotionally with you.
If you search Google or Spotify with the phrase “sad songs for…” and let it autocomplete the sentence, (my favorite name is “sad songs for crying yourself to sleep,” which I found on Spotify) you will get dozens of different situational playlists—there is a sadness for every season and genre. Why do people want to listen to somber things when they go through something sad? I think it’s because we wish to see and hear things that match our internal feelings because it makes us feel less alone.
It is hard to recognize the feelings of others and how to interpret them. We only really know about our own feelings because we are the only people who have our brains, and other brains are hard to conceive of. As Descarte observed, you cannot imagine not having a brain or consciousness but you can imagine not having a physical body. This is not about mind-body dualism or physicalism or anything like that, it is simply to note that the internalized emotions of other people are unknowable unless they attempt to tell you. People, as noted, do not go around telling other people how they actually feel in public. If someone, maybe a professor, passes you in the hallway and asks how you are, the default response is “Oh I’m okay… I’m fine… Not too bad…” when that most likely isn’t true. It might be that you don’t want to burden others with your problems; however, it might be an effort to hide the sadness in your life with a facade of contentedness. A sort of physical Instagram, without the filters, of course.
Sad music can be a good substitute when it feels too difficult to connect with other people over the bad things going on in your life. By listening to sad music, I can imagine that other people feel just like me; that I am not alone. The artists are telling me that they feel a certain way about something, and it works because no one else wants to. No one else in real life might be showing you how they really feel, but the artist is putting themselves out there.
Emotions are not islands, and they do not exist in a vacuum. This is partly why art exists, to show that others suffer and experience pain and sensation. According to a recent study from the Journal of Adolescent Health,, rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidal ideation among college students have been on a steady increase. This is true, regardless of whether people want to talk about it. I struggle with this, and more people than you might think also struggle with it, we just aren’t prone to showing it. Listening to a melancholic song does help sometimes, regardless of how small.
Being able to listen to sad music gives you company and helps put your feelings into perspective and that you are not alone. Even though you have not met these people, they feel like you, and you feel like them. So play that sad music loud and proud.