When I open X, Instagram, or Substack looking for something to read, I am often confronted with a series of textbites:

it’s yearning hours what’re y’all yearning for tn

big year for yearning, longing, pining, and obsessing

my playlist for yearning and sighing this month

I don’t know about you, reader, but these make me want to put my fist through some drywall. “Yearning” is yet another in a series of internet buzzwords to grip the nation. Google searches for “yearning” and “longing” have been on the climb for the past two years. The uptick matches a similar swing in melancholic media, with releases like Past Lives and All of Us Strangers, and of course, Normal People, especially the quote: “Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find where it was or become part of it.” On social media, Tiktoks about Sylvia Plath’s fig tree abound.

So, why are we yearning? There seems to be a collective sense of deprivation: Years lost to the pandemic, unfulfilled promises of adulthood, wages which buy less than they ought to. Fewer friends, fewer parties, less sex. Endless hours moping in bed, considering our bored disillusionment with adulthood. Sigh. Yearn.

Many people are fine with being home all day, or almost all the time. It’s okay to rot in bed, to want to rot in bed, to normalize that stasis instead of actively seeking fulfillment. This new attitude wouldn’t be a problem if everyone was happy. But I see the emergence of internet yearning as psychological displacement, a hernia-like, Freudian bubble of dissatisfaction.

In Cruel Optimism, author Lauren Berlant postulates that media trends reflect our attempts to represent affect, to create art which encapsulates the way life feels. Berlant explains that the modern individual feels unsteady, without a rewarding job or pension plan, stable government or a nuclear family. All this ‘yearnposting’ seems like a cultural reaction to our feeling of emptiness and absence. Many relationships—platonic, romantic, economic—feel unreciprocated, unconsummated. They offer little, promise nothing at all, or fall short of what you would want. So, we offer less of ourselves in return. It’s simpler this way. When the world is intolerable, you can always go to bed. Embracing dissatisfaction is easier than reshaping your life. 

And yet: The advent of yearning is evidence that despite our efforts to detach, we still crave meaningful connections and relationships. So, what do we do?

Berlant’s work offers a possible avenue. They argue “all attachment is optimistic,” because it forces us to enter the world. Attachment brings “the satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own but sense in the wake of a person, a way of life, an object, project, concept, or scene.” The opposite of yearning is satisfaction—optimistic attachment provides direction, pointing us toward places that can offer meaning when we cannot create it for ourselves. 

Longing is inherent to the human condition, but the emotion itself is not the beginning and end of experience. Yearning should be a catalyst, a forward step in the broader quest for self-actualization. Your desires should not confine you to your bed but lead you forward. As Berlant advises, the things we long for—people, projects, scenes—are guideposts for where we should invest our time, new places we could attach. Our emotions can be a tool for change, if we allow them to be. Yearning should make you do terrifying, embarrassing, rewarding things. It should overpower the lull of routine, shock you out of complacency. If you feel the pang of absence, don’t post about it. Don’t waste time normalizing or examining the feeling. Start looking for what’s missing.

As Maggie Nelson says in Bluets, “When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.” Do not become a student of your longing. Go looking for the light.