Chinese idiom · 成语
无病呻吟
Meaning
Moaning without illness; feigned distress.
Character by character
Origin and story
poetic expressionXin Qiji's Song lyric Lin Jiang Xian, beginning Lao Qu Hun Shen Wu Zhuo Chu, reflects on aging and living among woods and hills. The speaker notices that sighs have replaced pleasure and says he groans even without illness, then turns toward cool air, fruit, wine, and poetry. The words are part of a poet's self-reflection, not a medical judgment that someone else's distress is unreal. Later critics used the expression for writing that performs sorrow without convincing feeling. Its common modern sense is therefore affected lamentation or empty complaint, but it can be cruel if used to dismiss a person's genuine pain.
Sources and further reading
In everyday life
这篇影评认为电影刻意堆砌悲伤，却缺少真实细节，显得无病呻吟。
The review argues that the film piles on sadness but lacks believable detail, making its sorrow feel artificial.
Useful in criticism of affected writing; do not treat it as evidence that someone's suffering is fake.