The New Mal du Siècle

As in Musset’s day, young people bear the heaviest burden. Recent studies point to a clear rise in anxiety and depression among teenagers and young adults over the past decades.

Let us consider then, the condition of a member of Gen Z (born roughly between 1997 and 2012) through the lens of the mal du siècle, as a generational malaise, rather than as a mere aggregation of individual afflictions. Born after the late-20th-century promises of progress, stability and prosperity had faded, they grew up in a climate of uncertainty surrounded by warnings of ecological collapse, economic precarity and civilisational fragility. Like Musset’s contemporaries, Gen Z feel the weight of their historical in-betweenness and grow weary of inherited systems that fail to evolve fast enough to ensure their future survival. So it is perhaps not surprising that a great number of them withdraw into nostalgic escapism, romanticising a pre-digital past in which relationships seemed more authentic and the future appeared open. Meanwhile, they remain captive to the cold glow of screens, their social media feeds saturated with ironic fatalism. For many people, not only the young, pessimism and cynicism, or in contemporary parlance ‘doomerism’, seem to be the only response to a world gone awry.

Today, an increasing number of people feel frustrated by an existence punctuated by ‘doom scrolling’ and ‘bed rotting’, that is, spending long hours in bed in front of a screen as a never-ending slew of disjointed content leaves them feeling empty and exhausted. Long before the advent of social media, in a passage that could almost pass for a reflection on our digital lives, Chateaubriand wrote of the distress of having access to too much information without having the corresponding lived experience:

The more nations advance in civilisation, the more this unsettled state of the passions predominates; for then the many examples we have before us, and the multitude of books we possess, give us knowledge without experience; we are undeceived before we have enjoyed; there still remain desires, but no illusions. Our imagination is rich, abundant, and full of wonders; but our existence is poor, insipid, and destitute of charms.

While the youth of Chateaubriand’s day at least had their imaginations nourished by their reading material, today’s young people face real-time footage of war zones, updates on everyone they have ever known, unsettling AI-generated content, and tone-deaf advertisements selling them ever new reasons to feel inadequate, all before breakfast, let alone any real life experience.

‘There is not a single puppy leaving college who has not dreamed himself the most unfortunate of men’

Those who theorised about, and suffered from, the mal du siècle observed that it was transmitted and reinforced through social life and artistic expression. In a review of Étienne de Senancour’s Obermann (1804), a novel centred on another fictional mal du siècle hero, Sand wrote: ‘Our age distinguishes itself through a great multitude of moral maladies, unobserved up to now, henceforth contagious and fatal.’ This inevitably calls to mind the case of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s proto-Romantic novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), and the subsequent wave of associated copycat suicides that led to the book being banned in several regions. Today, our anxieties are similarly contagious, viral even, endlessly shared online only to be picked up, magnified, and fed back to us by opaque algorithms. This leaves us with the uneasy sense that our shared anxiety feeds on itself within what we have come to call ‘echo chambers’. The issue was once about how art reflected and shaped the world, but now it is about how our digital world, through invisible mechanisms, shapes and intensifies our distress.

The Romantics were adept at elevating their unhappiness into an aesthetic experience, at times even finding a strange comfort or familiarity in it, a sentiment vividly expressed by Victor Hugo in his novel Toilers of the Sea (1866): ‘Melancholy is a twilight. Suffering melts into it in sombre joy. Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.’ For today’s doom-scrollers, who share memes about living through ‘the end times’ in the ‘worst timeline’, there can be a kind of twisted comfort too, since, in the belief that everything is lost, responsibility falls away. While Hugo was describing a profound emotional experience, our over-stimulated dopamine-fuelled brains rarely find the opportunity to explore such depths. But in both cases, fixation on one’s own unhappiness risks slipping into unhealthy self-indulgence. Other figures of Romanticism (whether or not they accepted the label), warned against this. In his memoirs, Chateaubriand regretted the role his novel René (1802) had played in fostering what he saw as a culture of posturing and self-pity: ‘if René did not already exist, I would no longer choose to write it … There is not a single puppy leaving college who has not dreamed himself the most unfortunate of men.’ Musset too, in the Confession, cautions against dwelling too comfortably in one’s own sadness, over-introspecting to the point of paralysis, and ultimately surrendering to cynicism and apathy.

But it would be a mistake to dismiss Romantic sensitivity as mere navel-gazing. In Musset’s time, many used their discomfort with modernity not simply as an excuse to retreat inward, but as a call to action. Hugo, who found a strange pleasure in sadness, also spent much of his life campaigning against the death penalty, as well as against poverty, and for women’s rights. Sand, too, repeatedly chose to confront, rather than retreat from, the suffering of her age. Her novels defied restrictive social norms, and she played an active role in politics, founding newspapers and supporting workers and women. In his other writings, Musset often used humour and satire to criticise the moral bankruptcy and superficiality of the governments of his day. Beyond political activism, the literary sublimation of melancholy was a Romantic response to the colder and more mechanised aspects of modernity. For all their introspection and escapism, the enfants du siècle were able to look outward and detect the signs of a generational malaise, articulating what was wrong or lacking in their world. Their ideas and attitudes were so resonant, contagious even, because they tapped into something prevalent waiting to be acknowledged.

Perhaps we can learn from them. In a world that encourages us to numb ourselves to its horrors through scrolling, consuming, overwork and other diversions, there is a lot of power in embracing our fear, anger, sadness and grief as normal responses to an unjust system rather than as personal failings. This should not absolve us of all responsibility nor trap us in introspection but keep us aware of the fact that anxiety and sadness so prevalent and widespread are the result of how our world is organised. Apathy and self-indulgence are tempting refuges for those who are all too aware that things could and should be better than they are, but if Octave’s story can teach us anything, it is that there is no relief to be found in escape. We should instead aim to be more like George Sand, and act on our emotions.

Author: Emily Herring is a writer based in Paris, France. She is the author of Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People (2024), and her writing has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement.

- AEON