Bed Rotting and the Beauty of Melancholy
“Bed rotting,” a trend gaining traction on TikTok, involves staying in bed for long periods to rest and escape stress. Initially, it was framed as a form of self-care and a rejection of a relentless productivity culture that can promote harmful ideals. But beneath the surface, this trend reflects a growing movement of romanticized suffering, tying feminine identity to curated melancholy and passive escape—often at the expense of authentic mental health.
The rise of bed rotting is linked to the backlash against “girlboss feminism” and the wellness culture that dominated the early 2010s up through the pandemic. The relentless pursuit of success and productivity, encapsulated in the “clean girl” and “it girl” aesthetics, left many women feeling exhausted and disillusioned. During the pandemic, influencers in fitness and wellness, like Chloe Ting who creates workout routines, or Skincare by Hyram, gained popularity as people embraced the idea of using their free time to better themselves.
The pressure to optimize every aspect of life—whether through diet, fitness, or skincare—reached new heights during lockdown. Recently, however, for a generation burnt out on these perfectionist routines, bed rotting has emerged as a more attainable, "rebellious" alternative to the pressure to be constantly doing something and instead, slow down.
@ebbakloever 💌 #foryoupage #bed ♬ from escaping reality spotify playlist - virtual perception
The Sad Girl Identity and Rebirth of #Tumblr2014
An internet niche culture of teenage girls who identify with the sad girl persona, which resurfaced after its peak on Tumblr between 2011 and 2014, has embraced and rebranded the bed rotting trend as their own. The sad girl finds solace in her discontent, viewing it as evidence of her deeper understanding of the world.
This sad girl identity, centered around artists like Mitski, Lana Del Rey, and Big Thief, along with characters such as Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood, Nina Sayers in Black Swan, and Susanna Kaysen in Girl, Interrupted, encourages young women to identify with narratives of emotional fragility and struggle. While these figures offer an outlet for complex emotions, they risk romanticizing mental health issues by portraying despair as a form of artistic purity or intellectual depth.
For instance, Lana Del Rey’s nostalgic, melancholic music often presents brokenness as a kind of beauty. Similarly, Sylvia Plath’s writing is valued for its raw portrayal of depression, though some interpret it more as tragic allure than painful reality. These cultural icons, while reflecting genuine struggles, can reinforce a narrow view of mental hardship—young, beautiful, and tragically flawed—that frames melancholy as poetic.
As the sad girl aesthetic spreads on platforms like TikTok and Pinterest, the sad girl persona becomes more aspirational. The complexity of suffering is simplified into a static, consumable image, which can overshadow self-reflection or healing.
Social Media and Aesthetic Boxes
Aestheticized melancholia aligns closely with social media’s drive to reduce identities into digestible, marketable categories. The pressure to fit neatly within the confines of hyper-compartmentalized identity boxes has fueled trends like bed rotting.
Platforms like TikTok, driven by algorithms, transform trends like "clean girl,” “dark academia,” or “balletcore” into identity markers, reducing individuality to predefined labels. For bed rotting, this means the algorithm amplifies curated portrayals of detachment and melancholy, framing passive suffering as both relatable and rewarded.
This push for content that adheres to particular aesthetics—emphasizing soft, pastel visuals or moody lighting—encourages users to express struggles in palatable, visually appealing ways. This reduces complex emotions into consumable, superficial content, as algorithms promote posts fitting these trends, leading young people to feel their struggles are only valid if they align with these aesthetic norms.
The effects of such commodification are far-reaching. On an individual level, it distorts young people’s understanding of mental health, pressuring them to present pain in an appealing way to gain validation. Culturally, it entrenches stereotypes about femininity and suffering, where women are expected to embody fragility and melancholy. While glamorizing bed rotting may seem harmless, it contributes to a larger issue: mental struggles become fetishized rather than addressed, turning suffering into something consumable and leaving little space for healing.
If young people increasingly associate female strength with suffering, it may complicate future conversations on self-worth and mental health and validate ideals of endurance over resilience. These dynamics of external validation and performance feed into the broader construction of feminine identity online, where suffering is glamorized. A key example is the "thought daughter" identity, a term that humorously originated as a play on the meme “gay son or thot daughter,” with the joke being that parents got confused and chose "thought" daughter.
@moonafterhrs he sang the f out of this song | #loveryoushouldhavecomeover #jeffbuckley #lyrics #lyricsedit #mecore #thoughtdaughter #bedrotting ♬ original sound - ☾ afterhrs
The Thought Daughter's Romanticization of Femininity
The thought daughter identity is a persona that idealizes fragility as an essential marker of feminine beauty and wisdom. Loneliness and pain are seen as pathways to enlightenment. Imagery of porcelain dolls and fragile young women emphasizes the idea that to be a woman is to perform, and that pain is inherently feminine.
Haley McNiff, in her essay "Are you in your Fleabag era?," stated, "There is a sense of power, or even something as simple as an aesthetic of coolness, in turning toward irreverence in the face of pain. If women are drolly accepting their pain as inborn and inevitable, there may be an empowering sense of numbness in fully embracing that pain—in running headlong into it yourself and even bringing others down with you, if you so choose." Embracing pain as part of feminine identity can feel empowering but often reinforces passivity over genuine emotional growth.
The thought daughter trend exemplifies a dangerous reduction of women to aesthetic objects. Beautiful, "broken" young women become marketable because they embody a pain that is consumable, easy to package, and safe to admire from a distance. Yet, this marketing of suffering raises a troubling question: by reducing female pain to an aesthetic, are we hindering true healing and undermining the conversation about mental health struggles faced by women today?
The objectification of female pain in trends like thought daughter only scratches the surface of a much deeper cultural phenomenon. This romanticization of suffering is not a new development but part of a longstanding history that intertwines female identity with pain and vulnerability.
molly malone deserves better and its breaks my heart
Glamorizing Women's Pain Has a History
From Hollywood icons to literary figures, the narrative of the tragic woman has deep roots, and trends like bed rotting only highlight anew this connection between femininity and despair. Hollywood, for instance, has often focused on the torments of female figures such as Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland. Bed rotting, and similar trends, reinforce this narrative, casting emotional turmoil as integral to feminine identity.
Historically, women’s suffering has often been pathologized and punished rather than addressed with care and understanding. In the mid-20th century, women like Sylvia Plath lived in an era where openly discussing mental illness could result in extreme treatments like lobotomies—procedures used to "cure" women of their depression or anxiety by surgically removing parts of their brains. The most infamous victim of a lobotomy was the older sister of John F. Kennedy, Rosemary Kennedy.
Even earlier, the term "hysteria" was widely used to label women who exhibited strong emotions or any behavior that deviated from societal norms. The term itself is rooted in the Greek word for uterus (hystera), perpetuating the notion that women’s emotional states are inherently tied to their biology and cannot be taken seriously.
Further back, tuberculosis was an early example of this fascination with sickliness. During the 19th century, symptoms like coughing up blood, severe weight loss, and fatigue were fatal but idealized. Women, especially artists, strove to emulate the pale and fragile look of someone slowly deteriorating, drawing a link between physical decline and poetic suffering.
These idealized portrayals echo in today’s sad girl persona and bed rotting, where emotional disconnection and melancholy are held up as signs of depth. Idealizing female pain is less about individual trends and more about a persistent societal pattern that reappears in different forms.
@madhappyaoife trying (and failing) to stop scrolling for hours #pinterestaesthetic #aesthetic #fyp #foryou #booktok ♬ original sound - Lucas 🦇
Finding Meaning in Aesthetic
Social media trends that aestheticize issues of mental health blur the line between genuine expression and staging, turning suffering into an endless loop of consumption. This raises a critical question: is it possible to depict pain without contributing to its romanticization? Viktor E. Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, reflects on the inescapable role of suffering in life, writing, “If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering… Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.”
The tragic girl archetype may not be about glorifying pain, but about searching for meaning in it. Yet the problem arises when this suffering becomes aestheticized to the point where it is commodified. Are we to blame those who present their emotions beautifully, or are they simply reflecting the realities of a society that only pays attention to mental health when it is wrapped in a palatable, poetic form? For some, this romanticization may provide a form of catharsis, a way to process emotions publicly and find community in shared experiences. But for others, the constant depiction of beautifully tragic pain risks encouraging unhealthy coping mechanisms, turning suffering into an identity rather than something to overcome.
