The Cultural Rise of Yearning: When Longing Becomes Identity

“A deep, intense, often wistful longing or strong desire for something or someone, especially something difficult to get, unattainable, or lost, like freedom, a past time, or a loved one. It’s a powerful emotion that can motivate action (like working towards a goal) or signify profound sadness or nostalgia, feeling like an urgent need or hunger for fulfillment.” 

That is what Google understands “yearning” to be. 

Yearning used to be a topic solely found in romance books; the only time it actually saw the light of day was stuffed deep within emotional chaos. The thing is, it used to be private. People would mourn and grieve all the time, and yearn occasionally (yes, this is a note on Harry Styles’ fourth studio album, I’m listening to Aperture as I write this). 

Recently, though, yearning has stepped out of its tiny individual bubble and into pop culture discourse. As the Pinterest girlies are making another collage of an aesthetically pleasing picture tinged in the coolest black-and-white filter the internet has ever seen, “yearning core” has already long been established on social media and the discourse around it.

This, of course, isn’t the first time the internet has made use of agonizing human feelings – looking at terms like “sad boy autumn” or “nostalgia core” that have risen out of the great depths of social media platforms like TikTok or Pinterest. The internet has been known to give names, sounds, and visuals to feelings people have felt for ages. 

After all, that is what it’s especially good at. Short form content captioned “romanticize your life” or “main character moment” has become content most of us consume on a daily basis; the thought seems nice, living for the small moments, and adding whimsy into your life whenever and wherever you can. 

The real problem arises with dragging the idea of yearning being this beautiful thing we need to resurrect- because it apparently died at some point- into our everyday life. Yearning, at its core, is everything but soft and romantic, or even something to apsire in a relationship. It is restless. It aches. Some might even say it is torture to one's soul. 

Yearning is one of the more complex feelings. It’s not easy to digest, nor get rid of. When we turn that into an aesthetic, we risk mistaking inner, personal turmoil for depth, and this beautiful thing we crave. As Google has stated, yearning can be understood as hunger. It might look beautiful through a grainy filter adorned with pink cursive writing, but lived from the inside, it’s agony, suffering, and finally, utter misery. 

At the same time, though, it is one of the most human feelings one can experience. 

After all, it’s evidence about how much we care, imagine, and place hope and trust in ourselves and the people around us. There’s nothing cinematic about hurting, but online, even our most personal situations can easily be reframed into something desirable by simply throwing some glittery font, a nice filter, and #girlhood into the caption. The core issue I find within this is not the feeling itself, but the glorification of it and how we are thus okay with people attempting to normalize staying with this emotion forever, with no attempt to resolve it whatsoever. This way, we let the emotion overtake our being and enable it to become our only personality and ultimately identity. The allure of glorifying an emotion such as yearning is quite easy to grasp: it’s dramatic yet inherently relatable – the perfect mix to make it go viral and reflect in trends. The reality of it, though, is painful, messy, and torturous. But that’s the whole point, isn’t it? It’s there to be lived and learned from. 

Real longing might not always be instagramable or boxed up in a perfect asthetically pleasing shot, but it might be what makes us human.