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Twenty-Seven of the Many Emotions People Feel, But Can't Explain
From "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows", the YouTube compendium of vocabulary words invented by John Koenig
* Sonder
A realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own - populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness - an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you never knew existed, in which you might appear only once, as the extra of a film sipping coffee in the background, a blur of traffic passing on the highway, or that lighted window at dusk.
* Opia
The intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable - their pupils glittering, bottomless and opaque - as if you were peering through the hole in the door of a house, able to tell that there’s someone standing there, but unable to tell if you’re looking in or looking out.
* Monachopsis
The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings as a seal on a beach - lumbering, clumsy, easily distracted, huddled in the company of other poor misfits, not able to recognize the ambient roar of your intended habitat, in which you’d be fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at home.
* Énouement
The bittersweetness of having arrived here in the future, where you can finally get the answers to how things turn out in the real world - who your little sister would become, what vocations your friends would end up having, where your choices would finally lead you, exactly when you’d lose the people you took for granted - which is priceless intelligence that you'd instinctively want to share with anyone who hadn’t already made the journey, as if there was some part of you that had volunteered to stay behind, that was still stationed at a forgotten outpost somewhere in the past, still eagerly awaiting news from the front.
* Vellichor
The strange wistfulness of used bookshops - filled to the brim with thousands of old used books you'll never have enough time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and plastered over like an old room the author abandoned many years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just like they were on the day they were captured.
* Rubatosis
The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat, whose tenuous muscular throbbing feels less like a metronome than a ditty your heart is nervously tapping to itself, the kind that people compulsively hum or sing while walking in total darkness, as if to remind the outside world, "I’m here, I’m here, I'm here, I'm here."
* Kenopsia
The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned, quiet, and forgotten - a school hallway in the evening, an office unlit for the weekend, vacant fairgrounds - an emotional afterimage that makes it seem not just empty but hyper-empty, with total population in the negative, who are so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs.
* Mauerbauertraurigkeit
The inexplicable urge to push people away from you, even close friends you really like - as if all your social tastebuds suddenly went numb, leaving you unable to distinguish cheap politeness from the taste of genuine affection, unable to recognize its rich and ambiguous flavors, its long and delicate maturation, or the simple fact that each tasting is double-blind.
* Jouska
The hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head - a clear analysis, a cathartic dialogue, a devastating comeback - which serves as the kind of psychological batting cage where you can connect more deeply with people than in the small ball of everyday life, a frustratingly cautious game of change-up pitches, sacrifice bunts, and intentional walks.
* Chrysalism
The amniotic tranquility of safely being indoors during a thunderstorm. Listening to the waves of rain pattering against the roof like an argument upstairs, whose muffled words are unintelligible but whose crackling release of built-up tension you understand perfectly.
* Vemödalen
The frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist - the same sunset, the same high waterfall, the same curve of a hip, the same closeup of an eye - which can turn a perfectly unique subject into something hollow and pulpy, like a cheap piece of furniture you have had to assemble yourself.
* Anecdoche
The conversation in which everyone is talking but nobody is listening, simply overlaying disconnected words like a game of Scrabble, with each player borrowing bits of other anecdotes as a way to increase their own score, until they all run out of things to say.
* Kuebiko
The state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence, which force you to revise your image of what can happen in this world - mending the fences of your expectations, weeding out all unwelcome and invasive truths, cultivating the perennial good that’s buried under the surface, and propping yourself up like an old scarecrow, who’s bursting at the seams but powerless to do anything but stand there and watch.
* Exulansis
The tendency to give up trying to talk about your experience because people are unable to relate to it - whether through envy or pity or simple foreignness, which allows it to drift away from the rest of your life story, until the memory itself feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering restlessly in the fog, no longer even looking for a place to land.
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* Ellipsism
An unexplainable sadness that you'll never be able to know how history will turn out, that you will dutifully pass on the joke of being alive without ever learning the punchline - the name of the beneficiary of all human struggle, the final payout sum of every investment ever made in the future - which may not suit your sense of humor anyway, and which will probably involve how many people it would take to change a lightbulb.
* Lachesism
An unaccountable desire to be struck by cataclysmic circumstances - to survive a plane crash in a storm's gusts, to lose everything of value in a house fire, to plunge downward over a mountain waterfall - which would put a substantial kink in the smooth arc of your life, and twist it into something hardened and flexible and sharp, not just a stiff prefabricated beam that barely covers the gap between one end of your life and the other.
* Adronitis
A frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone, spending the first few weeks in conscious distress, hobnobbing in their psychological entryway, with each subsequent conversation like entering a different anteroom, with each discussion a little closer to the center of the house - wishing instead that you could start there, in uninhibited pillowtalk, and work your way outward, exchanging your deepest secrets first, before easing into a social casualness, until you've built up enough acceptable mystery to ask where they came from and what they do for a living.
* Rückkehrunruhe
That feeling of wistfulness upon returning home after an immersive trip, only to find that it is all fading rapidly from your awareness - to the extent that you have to keep reminding yourself that it had happened at all, even though it felt so vivid just hours ago - which makes you wish you could smoothly cross-dissolve back into everyday life, or just hold the camera shutter open indefinitely and let one scene become superimposed on the next, so all the days would run together and you would never have to call 'cut'.
* Nodus Tollens
An anticlimactic realization that the plot of your life doesn't make sense any more, that although you thought you were following the story in anticipation, you keep finding yourself out of whack, immersed in passages you don’t understand, that don’t even seem to belong to the same genre. This requires you to go back to reread and assess the chapters you had originally skipped to get to the good parts, just to learn that all along you were supposed to choose your own adventure.
* Onism
Awareness of how little of the world you'll actually experience; the dissociated frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time. Imagine standing in front of the departures screen at the airport, watching it flicker with strange place names, as if they were people's passwords, each one representing one more place you will never get to before you die - and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, 'You are Here'.
* Liberosis
An inexplicable desire to care less about things. To loosen your grip on your life, to stop glancing behind you every couple steps, afraid that someone swifter will snatch the ball, or you will fumble, before you reach the end zone - rather to hold your life loosely and playfully, like a volleyball, keeping it in the air, with only quick running interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of trusted friends, always in play.
* Altschmerz
Feeling weariness with the same tedious issues, same boring flaws and anxieties that you've been voraciously gnawing at for years, which leaves them soggy, wet, tasteless and inert, with nothing interesting left to think about, nothing left to do but spit them out and wander off to the backyard, as a puppy, to dig up that fresher pain you might have buried some time ago.
* Occhiolism
Philosophical awareness of the smallness of your perspective, by which you couldn’t possibly draw any meaningful conclusions at all, about the world or the past or the complexities of culture, because although your life is an epic and unrepeatable anecdote, it still only has a sample size of one, and may end up being the control for a much wilder experiment happening in the next room.
* Heartworm
A relationship or friendship that you can't get out of your head, which you thought had faded long ago but is still somehow alive and unfinished, like an abandoned campsite's smoldering embers at dawn, which still have enough power to start a forest fire.
* Anemoia
Nostalgia about a time you've never known. Imagine stepping through a frame into a distant passageway, a sepia-tinted haze, where you could sit beside a road and watch local passersby, who lived and died before any of us arrived here, who sleep in some of the same houses we do, who look up to see the same spectacular moon, who breathe the same air, feel the same blood in their veins - and live in a completely different world.
* Morii
Desire to capture and cling to a fleeting experience. With each click of the shutter, you try to press pause on your life's busyness, in a world stuck on play - if only so you can get a little more comfortable moving on.
* Midding
Feeling the tranquil pleasure of being near a gathering but not in it - hovering inconspicuously on the perimeter of a campfire, chatting outside a huge party while others dance inside, resting your head in the backseat of a car listening to the sound of your friends chatting up front - being blissfully invisible yet still fully included, safe in the knowledge that everyone is together and okay, with all the thrill of being there, but without the burden of having to be.
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