In late 18th-century Europe, you knew trouble was brewing when your son started wearing yellow pants.
This was a sign he might be suffering from the “Werther Effect,” so named for the main character in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1774 popular novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. The story revolves around a romantic youth with signature yellow trousers who, spurned by his true love, takes his own life. Young men in several countries, overcome by amorous fervor after reading the book, would emulate the protagonist in manner and dress, seek out their soulmates, and audaciously declare their love. And when the objects of their affection were women totally out of their league who were unswayed by maudlin displays and yellow trousers, these men would, like Young Werther, do themselves in.
The yellow pants were the uniform of mass despair caused by the novel—a sartorial case of social contagion. When this type of social contagion becomes a mass phenomenon, behavioral scientists have a name for it: a psychogenic epidemic, or one in which mental or physical suffering spreads widely and quickly, especially among adolescents and young adults, despite lacking any obvious biological origin.
Psychogenic epidemics are still common today, although they are not usually as bizarre as the Werther Effect. The 2026 equivalent of yellow pants is, I would argue, the hunched-over posture of a population addicted to the screens in our pockets.
Let me explain.
