Taylor Swift and the Trauma Generation

Is the Bad Therapy movement anti-art?

Long-time or middle-amount-of-time readers or accidental subscribers of Litverse may know two things:

• I’ve already declared myself a Swiftie & written about Swift’s ability to craft muses after every failed relationship

• I sympathize with Ernest Becker’s view that repression is reality and too much self-expression leads to stagnation

In the department of tortured poets, where Taylor Swift went to write her latest album, my admiration for the Percy Shelly-level drama Swift’s lyrics flows into my distaste for self-indulgent navel-gazing on antique grievances, whatever the navel’s net worth.

In the 31 songs of The Tortured Poets Department, we find Swift comfortably gazing at the same navel she has examined across her eleven studio albums with a determined conclusion: break-ups suck. Like Shakespeare, Swift knows the theme of love is universal and love ends either in marriage or music. In every album, Swift is betrayed and broken by break-ups.

Fans have done the math when evaluating the many muses of Taylor Swift. Swift has written:

29 songs/ 20 boys = 1.45 songs per boy.

29 songs of heartache/ 83 songs total = 34.93% of her songs of about guys.

15 boyfriends/ 9 years = 1.666.. boyfriends per year. OR One break-up every 7.2 months.

EDIT: Since somebody asked, she has released 36 singles, and 16 are about heartbreak, so 16/36 = 44.444..% ~44.4% of her singles are about heart-break.

The math works in Swift’s favor. Seven Taylor Swift albums sold at least a million copies in the first week. On Spotify, Tortured Poets Department was streamed 380 million times on release day, breaking Spotify’s record for single-day streams.

As Forbes describes:

In its first week of release, Tortured Poets Department generated the biggest Billboard debut of Swift’s storied career. It sold 2.6 million copies, including 1.4 million on day one. It is behind only Adele’s 25, released in 2015, as the No. 1 debut week—that album sold a stunning 3.4 million in week one. Tortured Poets Department surpassed ‘N Sync’s 2000 album No Strings Attached (2.4 million copies in its first week) for second.

Aside from the undeniably appealing pairing of Knausgaard-style confessionals with Shelley-style myth-making that terminate in songs that sound like what reality TV looks like, what’s the secret to Taylor Swift’s formula for success?

It’s all about the Swifties. And there’s a lot of Swifties: according to one survey, they make up 53% of the US population.

And what makes people diehard Swifties? An addiction to trauma.

In the anti-therapy view, Taylor Swift’s cataclysmic success is because millions of people are members of what journalist Abigail Shrier calls “the trauma generation.”

The Therapy of Anti-Therapy

What is trauma?

Ask different generations and you’ll get different answers. Research shows that just 8% of baby boomers say they’re willing to go to therapy. About half (45%) of millennials say they’ll talk to a therapist to improve their mental health and about half (42%) of adults born between 1990 and 2010 have been diagnosed with a mental health condition. For Gen Z, research shows that 9 out of 10 report experiencing anxiety and nearly 8 in 10 experience depression.

Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy (2024) blames therapy for causing a record-breaking mental health crisis (trauma) among young people and provokes a perspective not only on therapy, but how we express our experiences to ourselves, to others, and through art.

In Bad Therapy, Shrier forages a fruitful framework: therapy has side effects just like any other medical treatment and therapy can be effective but considered a last resort and when therapy isn’t necessary, the side effects are worse than the cure. The book’s thesis deftly focuses on patients under eighteen who have no choice in going to therapy, reasoning that forcing kids to go to therapy leads to unintended consequences. As Shrier explains in the book:

However hard we work to “destigmatize” therapy, the message to any child patient is twofold: Your mother thinks there is something wrong with you and Your problem is above her pay grade.

In cherry-picked but considerable samples, Bad Therapy demonstrates that dwelling on problems deepens the damage. Talking is not (always) transformation and talking about something is not (always) the same as moving on. Survivors of abuse and cancer, she argues with select studies as evidence, recover faster when they don’t go to groups to talk about their experience and instead live the life in front of them rather than the one behind them. Kids get more anxious when regularly talking about what worries them and more depressed when periodically sharing bad memories. In therapy, they live a life of labels (anxious, depressed, OCD, ADD avoidant, secure, gaslit, abuse) as thick as caution tape. Patients who start with a therapist at ten often have the same therapist at twenty and strategize about how to make friends or talk to parents about the past without ever considering what it would be like to find those behaviors themselves. Bad Therapy paints these scenes with a palette of interviews across therapists, therapy patients, skeptics, neuroscientists, teachers and parents to buff the boomer-friendly contention that the immaterial mind medicine of psychology produces side effects as surely as a peanut allergy or a pill for hormone correction. As Shrier puts it: kids are told they have an emotionally abusive mother and/or that they have post-traumatic stress disorder from a bully in middle school and the narrative becomes nature.

There are pharmaceutical proofs in Shrier’s investigation: 1 in 3 Gen Zers are using medication to treat anxiety and twice as likely to feel feelings of hopelessness and depression.

Shrier argues here that the easy access to soul-numbing pharmaceutical prescriptions robs Gen Z of feeling something real, bad or good, and therefore numbs the feelings that create the memories and behaviors that build resilience. This is the most interesting part of her thesis: in a life of labels, we lose our interiority because the labels become prescriptions because our quirks become conditions in search of causes in search of cures.

Art as Process, Art as Product

When Shrier appeared in the fireworks of my everyday social stream - whether on Instagram or Reddit, I can’t remember - she was telling Joe Rogan that talking about your problems makes it harder to get over them and with more people in therapy than ever, people are sadder than ever and this proves this tradition of treatment is not working. At one point in the interview, she compares the consequences of therapy to cigarettes (this starts at around the 14 minute marker in the interview).

When I heard Shrier’s idea that talking about problems made them worse, I decided even relating to problems through music must make them worse, too. I had been about to listen to the dark and depressing grunge band Alice In Chains as my soundtrack for lifting weights. Instead, I went to the gym without earphones and listened to ceiling-based blasts of reggaeton, thinking that if anti-therapy advocates believe that talk therapy can be damaging and deteriorative, doesn’t it follow that listening to angry, sad songs of dissatisfaction is just as bad for our mental health as forever talking about past problems without a time machine?

Music fans find their identities within their musical preferences, their character in genres, and worship their heroes as deities. We see this in the millions of Swifties basking in the sun-gold shadow of Taylor Swift. But what if all that basking is bad for us? When going through a break-up, is it better to listen to thirty songs about the human tragedy of doomed relationships or a house DJ mixing the beat with lyrics like “Here we go now”?

Music makes people feel emotions they can’t put into words. Songs are remote controls for how we feel, think, and see the world. Feeling alienated, is it better to listen to angry music that validates our belief and makes us feel less alone by knowing there are other people who feel alone? Is listening to Fleetwood Mac on repeat going to leave us just as depressed at the end of the playlist as we were at the start of it? Why do we feel the need to connect with art in the first place?

Releasing an album with the word “torture” in the title, Swift is validating her audience instead of challenging them. Rather than telling them to get over it, she’s acknowledging the trauma of the trauma generation and offering the novelty of new mirrors to look at old problems. New mirrors for the same old faces is big business in an expression economy and as a tycoon of the expression economy, Taylor Swift understands that customers buy tunes for tried and true traumas, not transformation.

This is the difference of art as product and art as process.

The art we experience as a product gives us the feeling we want, on-demand, and makes us feel less alone but leaves us in the same place as before we experience it.

The art that we experience as a process takes the feeling we have and makes us look at it beyond ourselves to help us see ourselves from a new perspective.

The Tortured Poets Department is elevator music for expression, but the elevator never takes us anywhere. If Bad Therapy proves thinking and talking too much about bad experiences leaves us sadder, shouldn’t the side effects of sad songs leave the same impact? Should the listener beware? Or is art a salvo for alienation and Swift’s newest effort an innovative cure for people in pain to feel heard and seen?

Does being heard and seen too much, too often, keep us stuck in the same place?

What is healthy expression? What is unhealthy art?

We’ll explore whether art helps us move on from or move into the pieces of ourselves in the next Litverse, Unapologetic Addicts, Dead Artists… in the mean time, read the Litverse covering Woodstock 1999.