Smiling At Someone Else’s Sad

Alex Balk
The Awl
Published in
1 min readJul 15, 2013

“Listening to someone else sing about his or her sadness is a vicarious experience, so the sadness we feel isn’t as threatening to our well-being. We can just sit back and enjoy someone else’s heartbreak.”
— This is an explanation for why sad songs make us happy, but it is also a metaphor for life.

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