Nobody Understands Me
According to Dr. Jason Dean with the Center of Developmental Psychiatry, “Teenagers have significant mood swings, rapid changes in their sense of self, huge variations in their moral code, and all sorts of other forms of instability.” He says the surge of hormones may have something to do with this, but another huge reason is change. The turbulence that comes with the transition from childhood to adulthood—like romance, familial autonomy, and potential career paths—can cause the psychological changes that bring out a person’s most aggressive emotional tendencies.
Because of this, teenage angst has been plaguing mankind since the dawn of our existence.
Life’s tumultuous nature combined with hormonal influx can trigger an emo phase at any age, but largely in early adolescence. While everyone has experienced an emo moment (or two) in their lives, and as Dr. Dean says, “Teenagers [especially] are dealing with overwhelming feelings, urges, and anxieties, and their developing brains are not yet quite ready to manage all of these feelings.” All those emotions are like steam in a kettle, screaming in a desperate attempt to escape the boiling pressure. However, in the last several decades, angsty teens have found new avenues to express their antagonistic emotions and melodramatic tendencies: Social media trends.
Online, emos can fish for sympathy, gaining attention for their woes by “sadfishing,” or deliberately airing their emotional experiences to earn likes and comments from their peers. According to Christopher Hand, a psychology professor at Glasgow Caledonian University, “[Sadfishers] have an excessive need for approval, are dramatic, exaggerate, and long for appreciation.” Often criticised for this attention-seeking behavior, sadfishers have seen a lot of backlash about their intentions, getting criticized for publicizing crocodile tears for the sake of Internet status. To avoid accusations of being a disingenuous sadfisher, or a sorrow-ridden clout-chaser, social media users must tread lightly with their trauma-dumps online. Since there are only so many ways a person can garner kudos for their emotional hardships, TikTok is the perfect soapbox.
Lucky for modern emos, who must compulsively broadcast their anguish to everyone online, there’s always a new trend, like the “Broken Bone Theory,” on TikTok to help them scream out into the void.
Sticks and Stones
The “Broken Bone Theory” has everyone’s inner emo reeling. According to Hirakishwar, a journalist from Medium, the theory suggests that if a person has never broken a bone in their life, they are then predisposed to endure heightened mental or spiritual challenges in life. Since they are spared the added physical hardship of broken bones, those particular individuals are then subjected to mental hardships instead.
In short, it means they were born to suffer, and to the emos, this trend is catnip.
Via u/katieohdam
There’s nothing an emo likes more than cultivating a mysterious persona online and airing personal struggles to feel important. To them, this imbues greater meaning to their life’s woes, while also weeding out who their real friends are. Only those who care enough to inquire further are proven allies. The desire to be dark and mysterious online is irresistible to the chronically broken-spirited, who seek the latest emerging trends to live out their emo fantasies of their teenage angst era as a way to validate their experience.
For sadfishers, reaching out into the void with cryptic messaging and sympathy bait has never been easier. Now, the speculative and baseless “theory” around broken bones not only creates a platform for questioning, but it encourages followers to reach out and inquire about a person’s medical history in an attempt to decode their emotional trauma. As convoluted as it seems, this outreach and emotional validation is exactly what every angsty teen seeks.
According to Linda Stade, a family counsellor, “Adults are always surprised that kids open themselves up to so much criticism [on social media], but the payoff of peer approval is so visual and powerful.” Stade argues that young adolescents are heading online to get the approval from their peers because they’re growing out of their parental umbrella, chasing their personal niche in solo society, even if that means bearing their soul on their socials. Because every like or reply they receive proves that social connections can be made despite the trauma of life.
Via u/brianna_mizura
The Villain of the Story
Broadcasting emotional turmoil online is an odd phenomenon. The combination of the anonymity behind the computer screen and the spotlight of social media, users have spent decades bearing their souls online. It’s as if social media users changed their status to “It’s complicated” in 2005, and they’ve been cultivating an addiction to emotional validation and melancholic mystery ever since.
TikTok may not be the best shoulder to cry on, but it will always create a new way to broadcast sorrow, and the sadfishing emos who seek validation can find an audience on their feeds.
Perhaps at the end of the day, the point of social media is to enhance communal connectivity, and despite the sadfishers and the clout-chasers, for some, expressing their emotions online provided the catharsis they needed all along. While “Broken Bone Theory” is entirely baseless and completely unscientific, like many emo trends, the point of it all isn’t to scientifically prove you’re sadder than everyone else. It’s just bait for the emos to reach out into the abyss, hoping that someone will reach back and ask to sign the cast on their broken heart.
Via u/dradhd