“As millennials, if we have more avenues to find love, we also have equal avenues to find heart break. And as singular loneliness and heartbreak feel to the person suffering them, they are the most shared experiences of the human condition. Even Elvis Presley in Heart Break Hotel crooned, “Although it’s always crowded, you still can find some room.” Yet, while our advertisers have their grimy paws in the love market, selling us access to companions, home loans, diamonds and holiday packages, it is the heartbreak market that is grossly underserved. Heartbreak is a sad business, but a profitable one.”
In a one year old column of The Hindu that I have briefly quoted above, columnist Aditi Mittal after recounting her own emotional upheaval after break up arrestingly asserted that “From solo dinner dates to shopping and haircuts to console yourself, the heartbreak industry can be quite a profitable one.” In a world increasingly embracing lassies faire, where capitalist inducements and consumerist urges are in a constant duel for the soul of man, it has been long considered that the only safe avenue is Love, the pristine manifestation of human emotions. But is it so? Abstaining from any generalization, I have ventured myself in a question that in our world where every human reaction has found it’s satisfying echo in marketplace, where does reactions arising out of love stands, especially the one’s dealing with pain, agony and to use the urban phrase break up. On the basis of this very premise I have sought to show how patterns of human psychological reactions in reply to loneliness or any traumatic event has been long been a vital current in the economic whirlpool of market forces.
For understanding this let’s consider a sector where it has been least intended and yet most visible – The publishing sector. Before venturing into it, let’s consider a valid question that props up that writing about heart breaks is nothing new. Accepted, yet what we have to analyze here is that why books dealing with heart breaks have been such a perennial streak in book writing, to the point that books of all genre be it Romance, Wars, Biographies, Sci-fic, all scramble to include at least one such event within it’s plot. (Many recent surveys have shown the genre most commercially successful is of Romance especially one with element of Heart break even surpassing Religious Literature at some points.) The reason I suspect lies not in every writer expressing his or her own subconscious testament of love but tapping in growing urge of “being able to relate” of readers and one thing every person irrespective of all differences is heart break (ironically even more than love itself!).
Highly popular books ranging from John Green’s “Fault in our stars” to back at home “I too had a love story” by Ravindra Singh have enjoyed phenomenal success. The common undercurrent lying being a tragic urban teen romantic narrative, a grim heartbreak, the ways the protagonist deals with it, sentimental lines and quotes and written in a form accessible to most basic of reader. What happens after this, either intended or unintended is that the book banks on exploiting reader’s own vaults of emotions and past experiences especially in a globalised world where more and more people are turning inwards. Reading about heart break automatically gives reader a sense that he isn’t alone in his grief but someone else too must have gone through, is going through, thus breaking the idea of uniqueness of personal pain and comforting him psychologically. Thus, the books that most genially express pangs of heart break, in it’s crudest, crass , sadist moments more it vindicates the darker side of the reader, which though physiologically repressed finds an outlet in these books. On other side, such books also help and go great deal in comforting the raw nerves and guilt factors suppressed in minds of reader which normally he or she may find difficulty in confiding even to closest of mates.
Many recent studies have conclusively established that human emotional reception is more attracted towards tragedy, grief, and of course heart breaks even if the person in question has never directly experienced any such traumatic incident himself. Thus, literature from time immemorial has banked upon this primal instinct of human mind in selling itself from Greek and Shakespearean Tragedy to Coleridge to our modern day pulp fiction writer’s. Illustrative of such tendency can be seen in Coleridge when he remarks in his poem Love that –
“Few sorrows hath she of her own,
My hope! My joy! My Genevieve!
She loves me best, whene’er I sing
The songs that make her grieve.”
Thus, we see how over time heart break travelling from being a individual almost an intimate event has become over period of time an industry with it’s own thriving literature and market, In fact a whole new genre all but in name, and lest I may add highly profitable one too. I would like to conclude, with the words of a great author who uncannily preempted this phenomenon –
“Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.”
No surprises the author was Oscar Wilde.
--- Bhuvan Krishna
09.07.2021
Sources –
1. https://www.thehindu.com/society/the-economy-of-loneliness/article26620804.ece
2. https://bookstr.com/article/book-genres-that-make-the-most-money/
3.https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/science-behind-why-we-can-t-look-away-disasters-ncna804966
Most Recommended to readers –
1.https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/11/the-psychological-comforts-of-storytelling/381964/
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