Heartbreak and Pain May Be the Most Lucrative Businesses Out There

Those sad old songs are banking on our tears.

Photo by Alice Alinari on Unsplash

Somehow, tragic endings make us care more than the happily-ever-afters do. We hang onto every singer-songwriter’s laments over a long-ago lost love even as feel-good stories get buried in our social media feeds. A girl will go missing and monopolize our news stories; a school shooting will wake us up from complacency to talk about laws that should have been changed years ago; and natural disasters and freak accidents make us pour out our empathy by the gallon.

“Bad news,” sad to say, sells — and it’s our reality that we can’t escape.

But I come back to the melancholy songs trilling about bad break-ups and think, “We really have a toxic relationship going on with emotional trauma.” The trauma itself can be someone else’s or even our own repressed feelings over what’s transpired in our lives.

Why do we torment ourselves with sadness and hurt? Are we all secret masochists as we hunker down with our boxes of tissues and brace against the bawling we’ll soon be doing?

I think back to my childhood when all I wanted was to live in a Disney movie. Sure, there were harrowing events in those films — a mermaid was manipulated into cutting her tail in two to gain human…