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The other night, I was curled up in my own little sad bubble, scrolling through reels with Taylor Swift crooning in the background. Somewhere between my thumb swipes and my tear-prone mood, I stumbled upon a poetry reel—bittersweet, beautifully worded, aching in just the right way. I liked it. And oh, the horror that followed. Within hours, my feed was drowning in longing—slow-motion walks in the rain, coffee cups left unfinished, quotes sharp enough to send you into a cardiac arrest, captions about almost-love, and sore-faced smokers puffing their way to grief. Performative yearning had staged a full takeover.
“Men these days don’t know how to yearn,” Ekta Sinha, my work bestie, yelled at me. “They’ll look you in the eye and swear they’ve never felt this way before, blow up your phone with promises and sweet nothings for a week, and then jump off the cliff. A week later, the same lines are already being recycled with another girl. There’s no depth, no Mr Darcy-style suffering. It’s all shallow talk, all for the ego rush of being wanted. And the second the high wears off, they vanish, leaving you wondering if any of it was ever real.” It’s a brutal observation, but one that echoes what many Gen Z feel — that modern romance has replaced torment with surface-level attention spans. We get the high of being wanted, but not the depth of being loved.
What Is Performative Yearning?
Think of it as longing, reimagined for the algorithm. Social media has always been a stage for self-expression, but with performative yearning, emotions themselves become curated. Heartbreak isn’t scribbled in a diary anymore—it’s turned into an edit with moody filters. Nostalgia doesn’t sit quietly—it’s paired with a trending Lana Del Rey audio. We don’t just feel anymore—we stylise the feeling until it’s scroll-worthy. “Sometimes I don’t even know if I’m sad or if I just want to post like I am,” admits one 21-year-old student. “It’s like being in on the vibe matters more than actually living it.”
Writing this piece reminded me of a very recent conversation I had with an old friend about heartbreak. He said, “Seems like you are doing well”—all based on what he had seen on my social media. I ended up giving him the lore because I was definitely not doing well. On the other hand, I thought he wasn’t either. Let’s just say both of us ended up realising how much of our lives online were just… performative.
The Aesthetics of Longing
There’s no denying that yearning content is addictive. Sad-girl playlists rack up millions of streams. Instagram reels of people crying in their bedrooms get stitched with strangers saying, “Same.” A Pinterest board titled us in another life feels instantly relatable—even if you’re happily single.
Why? Because yearning looks cinematic. It’s raw emotion, but safely packaged. One anonymous creator confessed, “Posting about heartbreak makes me feel like I’m starring in a film. In real life, I’d never let anyone see me cry, but online—it feels beautiful.”
The Reality Behind The Performance
Here’s the irony: while we collectively devour yearning content, Gen Z is arguably the quickest generation to detach. Ghosting, blocking, moving on—we’ve mastered the art of emotional escape. ‘If he wanted to, he would’ has become our gospel.Online, we yearn. Offline, we don’t linger long enough to actually ache.
Performative yearning, then, is our loophole. It gives us the thrill of heartbreak without the mess of vulnerability. We can dabble in the drama of longing but still keep our hearts wrapped in bubble wrap.
The Confusion
So what does this say about us? Are we numbing real emotions by turning them into aesthetics, or are we just finding new ways to share them collectively? Maybe it’s both. As my friend Amisha puts it, “I don’t think it’s fake. I think it’s just how we process things now—through edits, quotes, memes. It makes the heavy stuff easier to carry.”
I agree to this to some extent, but if you are constantly crying on your reels, even hinting at a psychological disorder, but aren’t seeking help… It really says something about the generation that has been fighting for mental health awareness this whole time.
The Curtain Call
Yearning once belonged to poets and private journals. Today, it belongs to the algorithm. And while I’m still unsure whether that’s tragic, hilarious, or simply inevitable, one thing’s for sure—I need to get away from the performative yearning on my feed—I cannot risk another spiral.