Can anything be sad anymore?

We see words like tragedy, and so on, on the news all the time. There are really bad things that happen constantly, like mass shootings, suicides, natural disasters and on and on. But everything gets shared so much now that I feel like nothing can really be sad anymore.

For something to really be sad in a true way it has to be kind of personal, hidden, quiet, kept away from the world. For something to really be sad it has to in a certain way just be for you. Something that you walk around with and know all the little private contours of misery about. But if something is widely shared, it becomes more of a spectacle than anything else. Other people turn things into absurdity. There’s that famous line by Stalin that “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” I think that applies to what I’m talking about here—that when something is sad for you, it is a tragedy, but when it gets shared and spread, it becomes a statistic, or an absurdity.

And statistics are nothing if not absurd. What can we really do with statistics? It’s dealing with numbers that are so big that they have no real meaning. Yet they explain so much about the world, and they influence so many important decisions. Experts and powerful people love to use statistics to guide their policies—yet everything keeps getting worse. Statistics represent reality poorly, they offer an absurd portrayal of the world. They leave no space for the real dimension of life, which always takes place subjectively, individually, for you.

Now, it might seem to make sense to share something sad, so that it becomes less sad for you, and gets spread out. To make it become a statistic or an absurdity might seem preferable to having something kept close to you and be truly sad. But I don’t think so. Does sharing anything sad make you less sad? Ever? Or does it just turn your sadness into something absurd, into a statistic?

At least when you keep something close to you, and don’t share it, you truly own it. And nobody else gets to know how sad it is. You don’t get to own much of anything in this world anymore, but at least your sadness, if you keep it to yourself, is all yours.

Now, it might seem tempting to share your sadness so that you can get some positive words back, about how people feel your pain, blah blah blah—but even if that does happen (rare), it means almost nothing. What good is there really about other people saying something nice to you about a situation they know nothing about? If people say cruel things about something they know nothing about, we would rightly dismiss that—the same is true for people saying nice things about a situation they know nothing about.

Sharing might seem like a good way to get some advice—after all, if you share your sadness, other people with similar experiences might offer their advice. But has advice ever helped anyone? Hearing some words from someone else and applying them to your life—believing that this could ever help feels like magical thinking to me. Advice, even when it has good intentions, only ever does one thing—it makes you more like the person who is giving you the advice. Advice is just someone else telling you how to be more like them—that if something worked for them, maybe it will work for you. Of course, that’s impossible—every single person is infinitely different than any other person. Even when someone seems similar to you, there are still massive differences. What worked for them will not work for you—it will work in terms of making you more like them. That’s it. So even when advice works, it only works in bringing you farther away from yourself. Even in the best case scenario of sharing—someone decides to give you good supportive advice—all it does is take you away from yourself.

Back to our initial question—can anything really be sad anymore?

With the world as it is, with everything constantly being put out into digital space forever for the whole world to see, nothing feels truly sad anymore. I think part of what made 9/11 the tragedy that it was was that it happened before the internet was really in its true form. In 2001, the internet wasn’t all that important yet. 9/11 coverage was on TV all the time, of course, but you could turn the TV off, go to your room and just think about it. Or go for a walk and get away from it. That actually made it more sad I think. I remember when I got out of school on 9/11 I went to my room by myself and just thought about it and felt the sadness. If every inch of it was shared on the Internet, I don’t think it would have felt as sad—it would have just been a spectacle and quickly become absurd.

If anything like 9/11 happened today, I don’t think we have the capacity to register it as a tragedy anymore. It would immediately just become images, memes, that are passed around millions of times and our eyes would be desensitized to it. We don’t have the time, space, or personal connection to anything for it to penetrate a level of real sadness now.

So if you have anything sad, you should keep it to yourself as much as possible. If you can manage to actually feel sadness about something today, that is one of the few signs of hope that still exist, and one of the signs of personal strength.