The Strange Pleasure of Sad Endings

When I finished watching Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, I sat in silence. It took me a while to contemplate these tragic events and characters and how I felt about their demise.

David Martinez died. Lucy survived. Night City kept turning. The machine consumed another dream and moved on. Yet instead of feeling cheated by the ending, I somehow felt grateful for it.

Cleansed, almost.

A few years earlier, I experienced something even more powerful with the Star ending of Cyberpunk 2077. After all my character’s suffering – that I got to experience with CD Projekt Red’s genius idea of using the first person as immersion vessel – leaving Night City with the Aldecaldos toward an uncertain future and leaving V’s dreams of greatness behind broke me in all the right places.

The credits roll and an uncomfortable question lingers: Why do stories like these affect us so deeply?

Why do millions of people praise endings that leave them devastated? Why do we return again and again to stories that break our hearts?

The answer reveals something profound about human nature. It’s taken me some time to ponder the question, and I believe I now have an answer:

We do not merely seek happiness.

We seek meaning.

The Paradox of Tragedy

At first glance, our love of tragic stories makes little sense. In real life, nobody wants grief, or heartbreak or death. Yet our bookshelves overflow with tragedies. We celebrate the deaths of heroes, discuss devastating finales for years after experiencing them.

In other words, we willingly expose ourselves to emotional pain through fiction.

More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle called tragedy one of the highest forms of art.

Sophocles' Oedipus Rex follows a king desperately trying to avoid a terrible prophecy. Every action he takes to escape his fate pushes him closer toward it. By the end, Oedipus discovers that he has unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. Horrified, he blinds himself.

Euripides' Medea tells the story of a woman betrayed by her husband. Consumed by rage and grief, she murders her own children to punish him.

Sophocles' Antigone centers on a young woman who chooses moral duty over obedience to the state. She knowingly walks toward death rather than betray her principles.

These stories contain almost none of the ingredients we typically associate with entertainment. Yet Greek audiences loved them. Aristotle attempted to explain this phenomenon in his Poetics. According to him, tragedy produces what he called catharsis: a purification or release of emotions. Through pity and fear, audiences confront powerful feelings and emerge transformed.

Centuries later, the mystery remains. Why should simulated suffering provide pleasure?

The answer begins with understanding what stories actually do.

Stories function as emotional simulators. Just as flight simulators allow pilots to practice dangerous situations without risking their lives, fiction allows us to confront difficult emotions without paying their real-world cost.

Fiction grants us access to emotional experiences that would otherwise cost too much. Yet that explanation only scratches the surface. After all, if sadness alone attracted us, every tragedy would affect us equally. Clearly that does not happen.

Some stories vanish from memory within days. Others remain with us forever. Why?

Because the greatest tragedies do more than make us sad. They make us confront meaning.

To understand it, consider the difference between pain and meaningful pain. A random injury hurts. A sacrifice for someone we love hurts too. The emotional experience may contain similar suffering, yet we perceive them very differently. One feels pointless. The other feels significant.

Why Loss Creates Value

If meaningful pain affects us more deeply than meaningless pain, the next question naturally follows:

What makes something meaningful in the first place? The answer, more often than not, is love.

We mourn what we love, sacrifice for what we love. We suffer because of what we love. Remove love from the equation and much of human suffering loses its emotional weight. The difference lies in attachment.

Psychologists increasingly view attachment as one of the foundations of human experience. From infancy onward, our brains evolved to form bonds with other people. Those bonds help us survive. Over thousands of generations, evolution favored minds capable of forming deep emotional connections.

Love did not emerge despite natural selection, but because of it.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar famously argued that human beings evolved unusually large brains partly because of the complexity of our social relationships. We survive not as isolated individuals but as members of families, tribes, communities, and cultures. Our emotional lives reflect that reality.

This explains why grief feels so powerful. The pain we experience after a loss measures the importance of the relationship that precedes it. As the psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes observed:

"The pain of grief is just as much part of life as the joy of love."

Literature has understood this truth for centuries.

Take Homer's Iliad. Modern readers often remember the epic for its battles and warriors. Yet its emotional climax arrives not on the battlefield but in a tent. After Achilles kills Hector, Hector's father Priam secretly enters the Greek camp and begs for his son's body, kissing the hands of his son’s killer. This reminds Achilles of his own father. For a brief moment, enemies recognize one another's humanity through shared loss. More than 2,700 years later, the scene still moves readers because it reveals a universal truth: love gives suffering its significance.

And of course, how could we not talk about Shakespeare? Romeo and Juliet remains famous not because two young lovers die. Countless fictional characters die. The tragedy endures because the audience understands what those deaths destroy. The lovers lose a future together. Their families lose their children. It is the future that vanishes.

Love transforms death from a biological event into an emotional catastrophe.

When audiences mourn David Martinez in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, they do not mourn a collection of animated images. They mourn a relationship. They mourn the future David and Lucy will never share. They mourn unrealized possibilities.

Conclusion:

Tragedy performs an ancient social function. It teaches us that pain alone carries little meaning. Pain connected to love, however, carries the most immense meaning imaginable.

This brings us to a deeper realization. Perhaps we do not cry during great tragedies because they confront us with death. Perhaps we cry because they remind us what makes life worth living before death arrives.

Love creates value.

Value creates meaning.

And meaning transforms suffering into something we can bear.