Why does Billie Eilish look so wretched when she claims to have found her true self? Eilish stated in a Rolling Stone account to promote her new song that she is interested in girls and described herself as a enduring artist with accompanying photos that showed her looking filthy and angry.
This was consistent with a Rolling Stone report from earlier this year, where Kristen Stewart boasted that she was the “gayest f-cking thing you’ve ever seen in your life” and that she was out to denounce herself as openly and violently gay. Stewart appeared angry and nearly aggressively unattractive in the accompanying photos, which required some doing.
These profiles resemble those of other female artists, such as Ellen Page, whose photo shoots frequently depict unhappy androgyny after switching from” Elliot.” These women advertise themselves as unhappy and yet terrible rather than presenting their rainbows identities as sources of joy and liberation.
And it is advertising. Interviews and photoshoots do n’t just happen. They are properly planned to promote famous people and their initiatives. Therefore, it is strange that these ladies are presenting themselves as miserable. As Eilish puts it,” My whole life, I’ve always been a happy man, actually. … I experience joy and laughter and I may find joy in stuff, but I’m a depressed individual. My entire life has been filled with sadness.
The apparent consensus that fan pity will resonate with them is what makes these interviews so extraordinary. Misery does love organization, but it seldom advertises for it in clear terms. These profiles go all the way to an anti-glamorous mode, a deliberate cultivation of ugliness, and not just stripping off the glamor that makes their famous subjects appear real and relatable. Call it sorrow elegant.
Emphasizing Nastiness and Suffering
The thoughts that underlie this are not really articulated. It is more a feeling than a idea. However, some themes perhaps be teased out from this focus on nastiness and unhappiness.
One is that charm is cruel and manipulative. It is unevenly distributed, and those who have it are presumed to either be using it to exploit people, or being exploited for it, or possible both. Another is that there is n’t even real hope. The tale was originally intended to promote happiness by accepting the supposed uncannyness of a rainbow identity, but it is now presented as offering merely more real happiness.
Americans are extremely lonely, sad, and despairing, lacking in purpose and from community and family, despite the temptation to reject this pattern as just another moody pop culture pose. And young progressive people, especially, are among the most affected by mental health issues. This feeling is only being enhanced by Eilish and the others.
For both regular young ladies and ostentatiously angry celebrities, there are good reasons for this pain. For example, social media has expanded the ruthlessness of paparazzi culture for famous people and remade it for common girls in its own right. Everyone is constantly being examined and put on display, and cultural death rather than social torture is the only thing that could possibly be worse than being subject to violence.
Additionally, relationships between men and women are messy, and there is n’t even a model or real framework for how to make them better. It is no question that more young people want to avoid being attractive to men or even to be any kind of woman as a result of the prevalence of porn, which even institutionalizes sexual violence.
The Pain Is a Warning
People in darkness and those enshrouded in fame and fortune are all affected by these issues, which are prevalent in our culture. The suffering does, nonetheless, serve as a must-knowledge that we are heading in the wrong direction. Hans Fiene, a Lutheran priest, just tweeted:
Many depressed people do n’t actually have mental illnesses. They’re having the appropriate answer to leading a life that’s opposed to pleasure. But opposed, in truth, that they’d been mentally ill if they were content. If you live a life of solitude, existing only to work for someone who does n’t care about you, no family, no kids, no exercise, porn addiction, weed- cope, animosity or indifference towards your God, you need to see a doctor if you feel like you’re crushing it.
Unhappiness, and the pain stylish that indicates it, is a natural byproduct of spiritual and relational hunger, against which worldly achievement offers no weapon. When public figures who suffer from depression make a public display of it, it should n’t surprise us.
Of course, an actress is in trouble if she ca n’t get through an interview without getting high and intoxicated. A pop song is a disaster, after all, if she keeps telling the reporter about her masturbation rituals. These are symptoms of suffering.
True suffering may be easier to fake glamor, but it is still unacceptable. Most of our culture’s suffering has no meaning, despite the fact that it has a goal, even if it is because unfunny as enduring an painful album cover photoshoot. The world’s vows have been disproven. Our liberal idols have failed to bring us joy or provide meaning and comfort in our enduring, from plastic prosperity to scientific advancement to sexual liberation.
Finding our true selves does not bring us happiness, given the cultural and religious wreckage that surrounds us. Those of us who have hope should courageously proclaim that we need fresh, transformed selves in accordance with God and man in this miserable culture. We need to discover Jesus and who He really is in addition to who we really are in ourselves.
Nathanael Blake serves as the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s postdoctoral fellow and is a top source to The Federalist.
