A scientific theory suggests that we have infinite emotions, so long as we can name them — and so we did, asking writers to identify new ways to feel. How many of them do you recognize?
Illustration: Zohar Lazar This week, the Cut is exploring a scientific theory that suggests we have infinite emotions, so long as we can name them — and so we did, asking writers to identify new ways to feel.
Libido Snap [data-uri="www.thecut.com/_components/clay-subheader/instances/ck642weti005733y6ws0mkkus@published"] span.fancy-divider{display:none} The quick, vague flicker of arousal that you don’t share with your partner, because you don’t really feel like having to get naked and have sex. Something is alight. Alive. A tiny piece of me that was dormant a second ago is awake and alert.
Heartbreak Adrenaline The strange feats of strength that can be accomplished after a devastating breakup. Illustration: Zohar Lazar Moved a couch on your own somehow? Heartbreak adrenaline. Applied for and got ten different job offers? Hell, yes, you’re sad, and it’s giving you power. —E.Z. Laugh-Holed When you’re laughing so much with someone that it feels like some part of you dips briefly into another dimension. Afterward, it makes the concept of an afterlife or other-life seem conceivable because what was that? And how can I make it happen again? —E.Z.
Pearning Yearning for the pond. Each July, a very small group of friends and I spend seven days together on a remote, miles-long pond in Maine. To get there, you drive about two hours on the highway, then another hour on country roads, then 20 minutes down a dirt logging road, and then you catch a boat to this place — an old Maine fishing camp, though none of us fish. There’s no internet and no cell service there.
Bureaucracies are as clumsily constructed as the First Little Piggy’s house but as sturdy as his more patient brother’s. The richest among us can pay someone else to endure its indignities; the rest of us pay in time. Which is why indulging buralysis feels at first like a kind of victory. Bureaucracies want your time; what better way, then, to tell them “Fuck you” than to deliberately waste it? Alas, once you’ve wasted your time, the bureaucracy comes back around for your money.
Itchy Teeth The restless urge to explode your own life by doing something that can’t easily be undone, like getting married, moving, becoming pregnant, starting a fistfight. Lesser teeth-itchers: a dramatic haircut, a different job, a large tattoo. Illustration: Zohar Lazar —E.Z. Hinterhuff A sense of latent fury that afflicts a person especially on mass transport, or while waiting for food. —J.K.
Attempted Apathy The feeling of trying to convince yourself that the thing you really care about and isn’t going well doesn’t matter. Watching TV, you are nauseated. Your team is losing or the election results are coming in. You’re pissed off. You’re more than pissed off; you’re irate. Your jaw is clenched. You want to scream. But calm down, you tell yourself, it doesn’t really matter who makes the playoffs. And even, I’ll be fine if America chooses its worst citizen to become president.
Groundhog Day–ity The sinking feeling upon realizing that the lesson you learned last week, and the week before that, and last year, and that other time eight years ago, is the one you also “learned” again just now.
But if not yet, then when? Who is ever ready to let their canine go? In the end, most of us kill our pups. We tell the vet to inject the stuff that ends their lives. After that happens, you walk out into a world that is as empty as a dog dish once filled with bloody steak. Licked clean and sparkling cruelly. —Lauren SlaterOn the internet [data-uri="www.thecut.com/_components/clay-subheader/instances/ck6459g9z011t3h67mqelk8xt@published"] span.
Premoji The feeling you get when you’re searching on your smartphone for an emoji that doesn’t exist. You want to use it. It ought to be there. You swear you’ve seen it before — a preying mantis, a pickle, a tampon, anything that will signify hair. But no matter how carefully you swipe through the menu, no matter how many synonyms you type in to activate the predictive emoji feature, you just can’t find it. It’s the digital version, in both senses, of a word being on the tip of your tongue.
Derivations include, Instagratifiction, the delight of accidentally catching an even better, funnier, more adorable or beautiful moment than anticipated, and Instambivalence, the sensation — avoiding Instagrief — that you captured the moment or the scene but in doing so annulled the true human value of experiencing the moment itself, while at the same time feeling the full glory of knowing the image is immediately out there being seen by the world of Instagram.
I know it’s close now, very close. Pulse rising with fear. Soon, a wriggling feeling. Maybe deluded grandeur, a quailing acuteness of confidence. Just enough to open another Word document. A solar barge moves inside me. I submerge into a first line; anything, words in a row; keep typing. A spiraling gyre arrives. Something’s here! I’ve charted this course, I think. I may know where I’m bound a bit. How? That’s too big a question.
Worklessness The reliably terrible feeling of not having done the kind of work that feels valuable to you. —E.Z. Ramo : The release of tension that comes with losing an objectively worthwhile opportunity that the least foresighted part of yourself did not feel like pursuing . In a sentence: “When the job offer was rescinded, his family was heartbroken for him — but in truth, he’d been dreading the move to D.C. and felt nothing but ramo.” —Eric LevitzOn other people [data-uri="www.thecut.com/_components/clay-subheader/instances/ck645vl1500b43h67rxweyefg@published"] span.
Loktif The anxious, dreamlike feeling of being trapped pointlessly in an eternal argument that can never be resolved. Prevalent during family holidays and long car journeys. —J.K. Hypeomania The feeling of strange pride when you dislike or don’t understand something everyone else loves. —M.R. Social Remorse The vacant, probing humiliation that follows a social encounter during which you comb through every interaction in search of missteps. All the things you shouldn’t have said and all the ways you probably looked foolish. Most often, this feeling descends the morning after socializing but can, in rare instances, occur while still mid-conversation, causing a temporary verbal paralysis and a slight sensation of disembodiment followed by a general feeling of panic. —G.S.
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