Editor’s Note: All opinion section content reflects the views of the individual author only and does not represent a stance taken by The Collegian or its editorial board.

We have built an entire aesthetic around falling apart.

The coworker who jokes she can’t function without two Monster Energy drinks before 9 a.m. gets laughs. The guy who brags about pulling all-nighters gets respect. The friend who drinks too much at every party gets a reputation as “fun.” We have handed dysfunction a social reward system and called it personality.

This is not a coincidence. It is a choice — one we keep making that has a real cost.

Romanticizing destructive behavior is not new. Smoking was glamorous once. The tortured, self-destructive artist was the ideal. We have spent decades watching those myths get dismantled by cancer wards and liver disease, and yet the instinct did not disappear. Now substances are more socially palatable, and the damage is slower, so we don’t notice — or, we choose not to. 

Consider caffeine. Its dependence is so normalized, that admitting you need three cups to function is considered relatable, not alarming. But chronic overconsumption is linked to anxiety, disrupted sleep, cardiovascular stress and dependency that structurally mirrors addiction patterns. Its withdrawal is recognized as a diagnosable condition. We have made the morning ritual of a medically recognized dependency into a branded aesthetic.

Overworking has also become its own social currency, particularly for young professionals and students. “I’ve been so busy,” is no longer a complaint; it is a status signal. Chronic overworking contributes to burnout, anxiety, weakened immune function and long-term cardiovascular risk. None of that is hidden information — we’ve just decided that productivity justifies the damage, so we stopped calling it damage. 

Pornography and gambling occupy a different tier of this conversation, because they carry more social stigma, but that stigma is selective. It attaches to the individual and insulates the system. We call compulsive gambling a personal failure, while designing apps with slot machine mechanics that deliberately exploit neural pathways optimized for compulsive return. 

Doom-scrolling is perhaps the most universally shared destructive habit that we completely refuse to take seriously. Research consistently links excessive social media use to depression, anxiety, distorted self-image and sleep disruption. We know this and platforms know this — their internal research confirmed it years ago. And yet, the cultural response has been a collective shrug — the occasional detox post, a follow-up reel about the detox, then a return to the feed. We joke about it because joking is easier than accountability. 

Eating disorders exist in a strange, insidious corner of this system because they’re both stigmatized and quietly rewarded. We say we’re concerned about them, yet compliment weight loss without question. We praise discipline without asking what it costs. We build algorithms that learn, very quickly, that fragility is aspirational.

GLP-1 medications complicate this further. Drugs originally designed to treat diabetes are now widely used for weight loss, marketed with a careful language of “health” and “optimization.” For some, they are medically appropriate, even life-changing. But they’ve entered a cultural environment that rewards thinness so aggressively, any tool promising it becomes more than a treatment. We are watching the medicalization of a beauty standard in real time, and when weight loss is always read as success, it becomes almost impossible to distinguish healing from conformity.

Here is what connects all of this: We have confused visibility with harmlessness. When everyone engages in a certain destructive behavior, we assume it cannot be that bad. Because it is legal, we assume it is neutral. Because it is monetized and marketed back to us as a lifestyle, we assume it is a choice rather than a design. None of those assumptions hold.

The deeper problem is not people engaging in these behaviors; it is the constructed social architecture that rewards performing them. Bragging about sleep deprivation signals commitment. Bragging about drinking signals social ease. Bragging about social media signals relevance. The behavior becomes identity, and once something is identity, questioning it feels like an attack. 

But that is exactly what those profiting from your dependency count on. 

This is not an argument for moral panic, or to treat every vice like a crisis, but there is a difference between a choice made with clear eyes and a behavior normalized to the point that opting out feels strange. When the unhealthy choice is the default and healthiness requires justification, culture has done the work of addiction for the product.

We have spent so long aestheticizing collapse, compulsion, exhaustion and dependency, we forgot thriving is also an option. Taking care of yourself is not naive, soft or out of touch — it is, in fact, one of the hardest things you can do in an environment specifically engineered to make it difficult.

We romanticize the wreckage. The counter-offer — not the wellness influencer, vision-board, self-improvement version — is to just as easily romanticize the rebuild.

There is nothing embarrassing about wanting more for yourself. There is nothing cringe about caring whether or not you are OK. The culture will tell you that ambition is hustle and hustle is suffering and suffering is the price of admission. That is a story told by people who benefit from your exhaustion.

You are allowed to want a different one that is worth romanticizing.

Reach Maci Lesh at letters@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.