At some point, a tragic backstory became a necessity for worth. I’m sure you’ve seen the glorification of tragedy, with crying selfies taken in good lighting, “sad girl” playlists and the perfect curation of melancholy
The usual spin on this is that it is progress. Older generations repressed everything, while we put it in a photo dump and call it healing. And yes, there’s something healthier about naming your feelings instead of pretending that they don’t exist, but I don’t think this is just vulnerability culture.
Instead, I see it as capitalism doing what it always does: finding a way to turn our deepest sorrows into a performance, quietly assigning them a value.
For capitalism to function, there must be winners and losers. Not everyone can achieve what western society refers to as the “American Dream.” Someone has to receive the short end of the stick — low-wage or precarious jobs, unstable housing, debt that never really moves and the constant background noise of “I’m one bad week away from everything falling apart,” while simultaneously being spoon-fed the illusion that the system is fair: work hard, keep your head down, grind and you too can “make it.”
However, those two things cannot both be true. If the game is rigged but officially “fair,” then our suffering needs an explanation that doesn’t evoke questions. The easiest fix is to shove it back onto the individual: if you’re exhausted, you should have managed your time better and if your life is a mess, that’s just character development.
That’s where this weird moral glow around struggle thrives. In a culture obsessed with merit, pain stops being just pain and starts being proof. People flex their hardships the way that they flex their achievements. Breakups, family drama, poverty, oppression and struggling with physical or mental health — it all gets folded into an unofficial résumé.
Whether it be the “rise and grind” rhetoric that glamorizes burnout, the “storytimes” where success is framed as the reward for surviving hell or the way people casually rank whose trauma is worse like tragedy is some twisted Olympic sport, it’s all the same logic. If suffering earns you moral points, you’d better show your scars.
But the problem is not that we show our struggle, but rather that we are taught to believe it’s the only way to become someone worth noticing. Capitalism loves a “journey”: the entrepreneur who slept in their car, the artist who starved before they got famous, the student who clawed their way out of nothing. Every brand, every celebrity, every self-made myth carefully packages struggle to prove that a secure and more-than-comfortable life has been earned.
So, when things fall apart for us, we start mentally editing it into a storyline, absorbing the structure of the start-up pitch deck and applying it to our lives. Every moment of misery is raw footage for a future highlight reel where we explain how we overcame it.
The problem is that most people never get the highlight reel. There is no big podcast interview, no book deal and no triumphant speech where the pain finally “makes sense.” There is just rent, work and the same tired thoughts on repeat. But this narrative doesn’t depend on you actually getting a payoff, it depends on your belief that you might. As long as you treat your suffering like a necessary investment in your future greatness, you stay loyal to a system that keeps cashing in on you.
Instead of being angry at the conditions that make life this hard, we’re encouraged to embrace the struggle itself. By romanticizing our hardships, capitalism dodges all accountability, blurring the line between what is natural human suffering and what is just boring, preventable suffering being spun as depth.
If you see yourself as the protagonist of a beautiful, painful transformation, you’re less likely to see yourself as a worker being abused, a tenant being exploited or a student being leveraged. Your anger gets redirected into a private aesthetic of playlists, photo dumps and inspirational captions. Being overworked becomes “hustle culture.” Being underpaid becomes “starting from the bottom.” Growing up in chaos becomes “where I get my resilience from.” And altogether they quietly protect the system that unnecessarily caused it.
If your struggle is what will make you great, why would you demand a world where no one has to struggle?
None of this is me advocating to stop making playlists or posting about mental health; I love sad music and tragic films and torturing myself with nostalgia as much as the next person. Melancholy is the price of being human.
My point isn’t that we should be ashamed of romanticizing our life, but to notice who benefits when we turn our pain into a brand instead of a complaint.