Since when did depression become fashionable? I’ve known girls like this. They lead happy lives. They’re generally upper middle class, they get into good colleges with tuition paid by their parents and their families are incredibly supportive of their pursuit of the arts/humanities, they have a large group of close friends and have no issues socializing, they have perfectly healthy sexual relationships.

But then on social media they fetishize this image of the “troubled artist,” some sexy Albert Camus type who wears long black coats and looks contemplatively at cityscapes in black white photos, smoking and spouting nihilist rhetoric. But that image couldn’t be farther from them. They’re socialites who like dark makeup and shop at Goodwill. They’re not wonky-eyed autists like Sartre or self-destructive maniacs like Nietzsche. They’re normal people who desperately want to be abnormal and hopeless, ironically en masse. When did this start happening?