It’s dark by the time you get home from work, and everyone is wearing Gore-Tex. Pumpkin Spice Lattes are back (inexplicably now in cold foam format), and you have the sudden urge to rewatch Gilmore Girls. It’s still too hot to declare that it’s properly autumn, but look, it’s properly autumn. If you can’t tell from the weather and the fashion and the beverages and the TV shows, you can tell by the ennui seeping across the internet: it’s fall, and now we yearn.
There’s no real reason why yearning should increase in the winter months – even if they are objectively more depressing – except for the fact the internet dictates so, and although yearning isn’t seasonal, internet trends are. Rat girl summer has endeth, so cometh yearn girl fall.
What is yearn girl fall? Is it something I just made up? Yes, obviously it is. But it also refers to a certain type of posting that you’ve already experienced; full of melancholy, full of wanting, sad girl-coded. Mostly experienced on TikTok, yearnposts follow a specific format: set to eerie or gloomy music (Aphex’s Twin’s “QKThr”, M83’s “Outro”, and Phoebe Bridgers’ “Scott Street” all feature prominently), they’re usually a gallery post of sad quotes from classical authors and anonymous posters from the halcyon days of Tumblr. Mitski lyrics appear seamlessly alongside Kafka’s love letters. These posts, sometimes called “webweaving poetry”, adore figures of endurance. With weird conflicting alignments with classicism and Stoicism (and more recently, femcelism), yearnposters have a deep affinity with Sisyphus and Camus, and they love Seneca.
Yearnposts are both optimistic and pessimistic when it comes to their views on life and the universe. They’re kind of dark academia, kind of art history, kind of cinephile (they’re frequently illustrated with film screencaps from the female rage school of cinema: Jennifer’s Body, Black Swan, Possession, Gone Girl; or with classical paintings of women contorted in pain, on their way to be beheaded or simply lying in bed filled with ennui). The one thing they all share is that they’re curated little performances of sadness and suffering.
And they’re becoming more popular, which is, it goes without saying, quite bleak! As a hashtag, ‘yearnposting’ is a relatively new phenomenon. It has half a million views on TikTok, with the more common, more simple ‘yearning’ clocking in at nearly 53 million. The Digi Fairy – a website which tracks trends in internet culture – called yearnposting “a new type of wellness”, describing the posts variously as glib, nostalgic, corny, devastating and wistful. “It’s the kind of content you look through in bed, before falling asleep, while soothing your ‘inner child’”, they write. “It’s the kind of post you only send to people you’ve been vulnerable enough to share your dreams with.”
What does any of that actually mean, though? How could ‘being kind of sad’ possibly be a form of ‘wellness’? These kinds of everything and nothing quotes lend themselves well to the vague malaise of modern yearnposts (and the similarly vague definition of ‘wellness’), but they don’t actually shed any light on why this is a trend and what it is. Perhaps it’s so confusing to us because this isn’t actually what yearning is. Or at least, it’s not what yearning used to be.
As a concept, ‘yearning’ became a cultural buzzword courtesy of Betty Friedan and her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, which introduced the world to second-wave feminism and would ultimately inspire Betty Cooper’s book in S7 of Riverdale. In The Feminine Mystique, yearning was a byword for women (wives) who were filled with ennui because they wanted more from their stifled, domestic lives. “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women,” she wrote. “It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone.
“As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, and lay beside her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – ‘Is this all?’”
Yearning was always a female-coded term then, but it used to mean something else; it used to be a way to long for independence, education and political rights. In the 60 years since the book was first published, yearning has undergone a definitional and vibes-based change. It’s not a byword for women individually wanting more from their lives; instead, it’s mainly a byword for girls on the internet wanting difference in their lives. At its most unintentionally depressing, it’s a byword for girls on the internet wanting men, or at least romantic love, in their lives.
It’s a bit too easy to blame TikTok for the rise of yearnposting in its new shallow iteration. Its current popularity owes a lot to the nascent days of sadgirl posting on Tumblr. All the way back in 2019, a Tumblr post, pre-FYP saturation, defined it as “posting about your sadness”. “But”, it adds, “I think (in my mind at least) it’s specific to gay people on tumblr posting about wanting gay romance and genuine human connection. It’s like the Mitski cover of [“Let’s Get Married”].” A year later a Medium essay argued it was “not the expression of pain, rather, it’s the expression of hope, longing and anticipation”.
In other words, yearnposting is popular because it means nothing, because it means whatever the particular creator wants it to mean at one particular time. It’s September right now, so yearning is about academic or creative failure, about loneliness and seasonal affective disorder, about leaving home, about leaves turning orange, about being single when it’s a bit cold. In January, it will be all these things but worse. In summer it will be full of Georgia O’Keefe quotes about feeling listless when it’s too hot outside.
If we try – really try! our hardest! – to be less cynical about yearnposting, there’s an argument to be made that this definitional change could offer something positive. Sure, we’re not struggling with yearning at home alone anymore, washing dishes and taking Quaaludes, but maybe that’s a sign we’ve found a way to express emotional solidarity. Where once young women would have been in an endless, fruitless competition with one another, now we can yearn together. Yearning isn’t a state or being; it’s a verb. It’s not something women struggle with alone; it’s something girls post collectively (every woman on the internet is a girl for some reason, sorry, it’s canon).
But we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves. So-called yearnposting and our new definition of yearning is not transgressive either. It’s reductive to think that women can only perform solidarity when we’re posting about girls being sad. And ultimately, yearnposting, much like crying selfies, celebrity apology videos and the cult of the dissociative pout, is not authentic vulnerability but a performance of vulnerability, repackaged for the consumption of the algorithm. In the age of the internet, yearning, collectively and individually, is something that’s as far away as humanly possible from an expression of a feeling so deep and inexpressible that it cannot be named. Now, it’s just another way to build your own brand.
Without being nihilistic about it, it can’t be a good sign for a generation that’s frequently accused of being solipsistic and chronically lonely that the only way we can express genuine emotion is by writing vaguely apologetic tweets about being “too sad to yearnpost”. There’s a fine line between solidarity and glorification, and the problematic figure of the Sad Online Girl doesn’t need more fuel for her fire. It’s tragic and strange, but being glued to our phones all day, yearning for all the lives we scroll past, has ruined our ability to yearn for anything better for ourselves. We have FOMO rather than any internal urges. As one recent meme ironically puts it; “you obsess over your identity in relation to others while your soul rots within you”. And perhaps the only way we can reconnect with its true meaning again is to log off and stop posting Mitski quotes to our stories as a conduit for actually feeling uncomfortable things.