Emotional Granularity

Feeling blue seems like its own thing, distinct from the color and its connotations. It’s a coloring of experience in a metaphorical sense, a cooling of the mood that’s related to sadness but not quite the same thing.

A popular view of the cycle of the year, moving from season to season, is that each season has its own particular mood and meaning: Spring representing growth, summer representing the joy of… more emotion Wintering

Many songs have been written about the wisdom of finding pleasure in our everyday toil. There’s Whistle While You Work from Sleeping Beauty, for instance, and A Spoonful of Sugar from Mary Poppins…. more emotion Sanuk

Some emotions are linked to particular moments in our schedules. A Friday feeling, for example, typically comes on a Friday, although it can occur at any other time characterized by changing expectations. The… more emotion Morgenfrisk

It’s a rare expression of political consensus: Everyone seems to agree that to watch the first debate of the 2020 US presidential general campaign was an emotionally disturbing experience. Rather than engaging in… more emotion Rattled

Like many emotions, the fraying is an external physical metaphor for what’s happening inside ourselves, our focus unspun, our presence gone somewhere else.

In Czech, there is a word used to describe a kind of sadness that people are happy to have. Krasosmutnění is a beautiful sort of blues, a pain that uplifts us even as… more emotion Krasosmutnění

The hottest fires extinguish their fuel at the quickest rate, then move on to burn elsewhere. Soulmates uncouple more often than not.

It’s the emotion of anticipating someone else’s arrival to such an extent that it’s impossible not to peer through the window over and over again, just in case the expected visitor is almost there.

A literal trap is a device that lures an animal in, and then closes in around them, with something like a box, a rope, a net, or an unbreakable metal clamp. An animal… more emotion Trapped