This Coming Darkness
Written January 10, 2005

“He left today, stealing the last fragment of my shattered heart. I think I might kill myself.”

The text is stark, solitary, rendered in a boldly inventive (and very hideous) visual schema. It takes itself seriously, this hint at suicide - there’s clearly no joke in action here, no “Hahaha j/k mafackers!” solution. It’s clichéd but effective, hammering unwitting readers with the somber news that this girl’s boyfriend has cruelly given her the boot and left her in devastated isolation. And it’s complete BS.

I scroll down the screen, but I already know what’s waiting. Several more laments of tragic break-ups past – often occurring within the same week. More suicide pacts. More drama, interspersed with riveting accounts of products purchased and malls visited. More of the same.

I don’t know this girl. I don’t know her name or where she’s from – all I know is that the Great Internet, in its infinite wisdom, has randomly connected me to her LiveJournal because I was bored.

The web is beginning to resemble a vast fishbowl, teeming with life both large and small. As online presence becomes less geeky and more necessity, millions of people are rushing to throw their thoughts into the surging maelstrom. Blogging is a remarkably accessible cross-section of society, a brief glimpse into the lives of the digital generation. And within this whirling sea of words, a pattern is starting to form: the romance of melodrama.

The scary thing about Shattered-Heart Girl is that she isn’t a trouble spot on the blogging circuit – she’s the status quo. An astounding number of individuals use their online space to write their own personal soap opera with a sad ending. The tragedies are blown up, accentuated, worshipped. Unhappiness is the order of the day, expressed through Taking Back Sunday lyrics and terrible unrhymed poetry. And it’s all very contrived.

Maybe we’ve done this to ourselves. Drowning in a mass produced society, we desperately need to add value to our lives, to stand out from the infinite growth that is humanity. Our individuality demands distinction. Conform too much and you fade: another face lost in the annals of history, just another brick in the wall.

The digital generation predictably takes to the digital realm for this task. Websites become a proud placemarker for their authors, a stamp on the virtual landscape that proclaims “I WAS HERE.” It’s a good first step, but here comes the sad part: most people don’t do anything. No writing skills, no nunchuck skills. Hobbies and personal interests are superseded by magnetic attraction to pop culture, but that’s not enough – nobody wants their legacy to consist of gushing about Ashlee Simpson.

And so the next step is to turn to personal relationships. Sex is a huge part of our lives and love is a hot topic. Everyone can relate but nobody can replicate your experiences. But here’s the key: these affairs need to be memorable if they are to serve as an icon of individual achievement. They need to be powerful, just like on TV. They need to be emotional, like the pop-punk songs. They need to be dramatic.

Melodrama is born. The heart is a carefully manufactured pincushion. Every break-up becomes an earth shattering travesty. Surrounded by the plastic joys of bubblegum pop culture, the only things that seem real anymore are the sob stories. If everything’s going fine, we’ll fuck it all up and start new problems just to keep the legend growing.

If moths are fatally bound to the flame, are we similarly drawn to the darkness?

This column turned out a little strangely. There was a lot of stuff I wanted to address here; primarily the preoccupation with sadness in a lot of kids these days, largely fueled by depressing relationship-centric music (Brand New and the like). It's pretty messed up that broken hearts are becoming borderline desirable, a validation of sorts. There are a surprising number of people who don't want to be happy, who don't see it as a viable way to live and, whether consciously or not, want nothing more than to show the world how badly their relationships suck. And that's all well and good, but I also wanted to talk about the blog culture which really highlights and exposes this phenomenon and let's be serious, 600 words is certainly not enough to completely explore and connect all of these ideas. So what we have here is a delightful little mishmash of all these thoughts, combined with a little hackneyed cultural criticism. Serve chilled and shake vigorously before consuming.