Stories of Emotional Granularity

I can’t think of any expression that is more emotionally powerful than the voice of a singer. When a person writes an effective song with lyrics that are matched by a rhythm and melody that enhance the feeling of the words, the songwriter digs down deep to reflect something real, an emotion that other people can identify with. Sure, there is bad music, and there are superficial jingles, but when a...

We’re living in a remarkably complex society, and that sometimes makes it extremely difficult to tell the difference between selfishness and selflessness. Gone are the days when people could follow straightforward, predictable paths in their professional or personal lives. Social structures such as places of work are becoming less stable, year after year, as Silicon Valley’s tactic of gaining powe...

The emotion of grounding is a reminder that emotion isn’t an isolated cognitive experience that can be assessed through a linguistic analysis of someone’s online chats or a digital scan of their facial expression. As with all emotion, a feeling of being grounded is formed in relationship to a person’s past experiences and future expectations, and in reaction to personal and cultural traditions and...

This podcast explores emotional diversity because it’s central to a worthwhile human life. Diversity simply refers to the fact that difference exists. People experience emotions differently. Different emotional experiences can be pointed to by a single emotional label, and people interpret even so-called basic emotions in vastly different ways. By examining and questioning our emotions, we develop...

With sehnsucht, there is a sense of something that’s on the edge of conscious awareness. It can be like remembering that you’ve forgotten something, but without being able to remember exactly what it is that you have forgotten. Another version of sehnsucht is the feeling that a certain place or object holds within it some potential for a better life, without understanding explicitly how that impro...

This week on Stories of Emotional Granularity, I want to do something a little bit different, but something I’ve been meaning to get to ever since the first season of the podcast last spring. I want to share with you some of the resources I have used to identify some of the many emotions that I’ve listed on my web site and begun to describe here on the podcast. Let’s celebrate the work of Lisa Fel...

We are lucky to find happiness when we can, and the best we can do is appreciate moments of happiness while they last, because just as we do not have to power to compel true happiness to arrive through force of will, we cannot prevent happiness from fading away in time.   Perhaps the secret of happiness is that happiness is not something we can achieve. We can make happiness more probable by...

This week, we will be talking about anxiety, because anxiety is real. Anxiety is equally as true as happiness. Anxiety is inescapable. Anxiety does not go away if we stop talking about it. What’s more, in our time, anxiety is growing. It is spreading like the darkness of winter. I can’t put it more simply than this: Something feels wrong. Guests in this episode include anthropologist Richard Curri...

In natural ecosystems, wildfires burn through a landscape, destroying much of what has grown up there, but in doing so, leave behind the nutrients and open space required for new, fresh growth to begin. The occasional disaster here and there enables the presence of an ecologically diversity, rather than the simplicity of a well-established ecology that is uniform as a result of its stability. Just...

Sadness is murky. It makes the mind unclear, unable to perceive positive emotions. It’s the feeling of wrongness that reinforces himself. That sense of wrongness within sadness can develop into a feeling of being broken, as if there’s something malfunctioning in one’s self or in the world that is bringing sadness into existence. Feeling sad isn’t at all unusual, however. It’s a central part of the...

In a new episode of the popular cable TV show And Just Like That, it’s proposed that “Men are dumb with feelings.” Is that true? This podcast episode considers what we know about emotion and gender. What does the gender imbalance in this podcast’s guests suggest about the relationship between emotion and gender? Should I adjust the design to compensate, and restore gender balance? This episode exp...

Emotionally, having arrived feels like the proper ending to a story. Our arrival seems like a culmination of all our efforts so that all our problems are solved.   Of course, that’s not how life really works. Often, we find that the place we’ve arrived at isn’t what we expected it to be. It begins to feel more difficult to remain in that place, as new needs arise, and new problems have to be...

The pleasure that people find in work doesn’t follow any kind of universal formula. There’s no recipe for arbejdsglaede that’s going to work for everyone, because different people have different kinds of work that requires different skills and different forms of dedication. Guests in this episode include Brandy Agerback, Eleni Poulos, John Pabon, and Ranelle Golden

Flow isn’t static. Change is an essential aspect of what flow is. Water that just sits there doesn’t flow. It’s stagnant, and flow is about creativity, not stagnation. Flow simultaneously allows us to dive into creative process and to connect the ideas within our work to tangible patterns built through our physical senses.

We give trust because we trust in trust. When people choose to trust each other, people actually tend to be more trustworthy as a result. On the other hand, the opposite is also true. Once people begin feel distrust in each other, they become more distant and wary of each other, making untrustworthy behavior more likely.

Grieving for a dying friend or family member is difficult enough. How can we grieve for a dying planet? This planet explores the boundaries of the scale of human emotion with the planet-sized climate grief, featuring the voices of Betti Rooted Lionheart, Shannon Haskins, Eleni Populous, Ian Williams, John Pabon, and Todd Saddler.

This episode explores the emotion of pride in the context of LGBTQ and disabled identities, with stories from authors Lee Wind, Savannah Hauk, and Karol Ruth Silverstein, along with a passage from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

there are some emotions that have yet to be assigned particular words to enable us to communicate about them. We can feel emotions without having a name for them. We feel these things even as we struggle for ways to communicate them to others. These are emotions on the cusp of being known, aspects of our individual experiences even though they don’t yet have a socially-recognized label. This space...

Surrender is the opposite of strategy. Strategy is thoroughly infused with the presumption of control. Surrender abandons strategic plans for controlling the future and allows for something else to be in charge. In this episode, Josie Gibson, Sonja Kresojevic, Jonathan Schwarz, Daniel Gomez Seidel, and Regina Lark share stories of surrender

What is love, if people can feel love for so many different things in so many different ways? How are all of these different kinds of love still love? In this episode, we hear stories of love from Harker Jones, Ranelle Golden, Rebecca Rose Vassy, Nancy Perpall, Betti Rooted Lionheart, Kristen Donnelly, and Robin Hafitz.

In this episode, Rebeca Arbona discusses the power in a name, and dadirri, the Ngangikurungkurr word for deep listening that comes as a result of patient, silent waiting, is explored by Jonas Altman, Betti Rooted Lionheart, Eric Christiansen, and Miriam Bekkouche.

Defined literally, a mask is something designed for a person to wear over their face, covering the face itself with something else. A mask obscures the face of the person who wears it, but also reveals a personality of its own. So, to feel unmasked is to feel as if one performance of identity has been removed, making it possible for others to observe something of the self that had been hidden from...

Alyssa Kearney, Audrey Holocher, and Josie Gibson discuss their experiences of the emotion of yugen, an emotional concept that arose out of the art and philosophy of China and Japan.

Generative AI models such as ChatGPT are celebrated as superior sentient beings when they produce bad imitations of basic human work. At the same time, complex human consciousness is dismissed as flat. What are the consequences of this lopsided cultural interpretation of technology, and what are the implications for the emotion of curiosity?

Feeling curious means being willing to try to understand what’s happening in unfamiliar places with people who have other perspectives. This episode features insights about the emotion of curiosity from Dr. Michelle Maidenberg, Dr. Melissa Green, Adam Baruh, Kristen Donnelly, Chesline Pierre-Paul, and Bhavik Joshi.