Stories of Emotional GranularitY
A podcast Exploring the diversity of human experience
SehnSucht
Sehnsucht is a specific kind of longing in which a person feels a sense of incompleteness while feeling that what they are looking is out there, hauntingly close and yet just beyond the ability to grasp it.
Resources of Emotional Granularity
This week on Stories of Emotional Granularity, we’ll do something different. I’ll 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.
Happiness
Perhaps happiness is a feeling that just happens to happen, whether we deserve it or not.
Anxiety
Anxiety is 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.
Burnout
To meaningfully discuss the feeling of being burned out, it is necessary for us to acknowledge that often, our lives aren’t as lovely and under control as we often like to pretend. Burnout happens when we can no longer maintain the façade of life as it’s supposed to be, and the image we project for others to see falters.
Sadness
Sadness is one of the most common and familiar of emotions, but it's certainly not basic. Sadness has many emotional associates, and hides itself in plain sight in the guise of defensive anger, protecting our vulnerabilities. What if we were to achieve a life without sadness?
Gender and Emotion
This episode takes a detour away from the standard format of the podcast, exploring a problem that two previous guests identified: There are many more women as guests on this podcast than men… twice as many. Why is that the case?
Arrived
The feeling that one has arrived is an emotion that’s situated within the narrative arc of a journey. First, there was a departure. Then, there was travel, a passage away from the point of departure. Arrival is the emotion that comes when it seems that this journey has come to its completion.
Arbejdsglaede
There’s no formula 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.
FLux
To be in flux is to be flexible. When we’re flexible, we can bend to meet the moment. On the other hand, we might get bent out of shape, or even broken.
Trust
Trust is the emotion of enduring truth. This episode of Stories of Emotional Granularity features insights into trust from Betti Rooted Lionheart, Kristen Donnelly, Robin Hafitz, Shannon Haskins, and Marie Thouin.
Climate Grief
Climate grief is how we feel when our living planet deteriorating, the biosphere crumbling toward the ultimate death.
Pride
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.
An Emotion Without A Name
Sometimes we feel emotions that don’t yet have a name. This trailer for the second season of the podcast considers the combination of rage and joy experienced in reaction to an episode of the innovative TV series The Last Of Us
Surrender
Surrender is the emotion of letting go. In the feeling of surrender we abandon strategic plans for controlling the future and allow for something else to take charge.
Love
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?
Dadirri
Dadirri is a word from the Ngangikurungkurr people of northern Australia. There is no single word in English that can be used as a simple translation of the concept of dadirri. It might be described as an experience of deep listening that comes as a result of patient, silent waiting.
Unmasked
Not all the masks people wear can be tied on with a piece of string. People wear figurative masks as well, making deliberate choices to present themselves in a manner that seems authentic, but doesn’t match what they’re feeling on the inside.
Yugen
Yugen is a subjective emotional experience in which a person glimpses something of their place in the immensity of a larger reality that is vast beyond words, whether that reality is in the wider cosmos, the depth of time, or something within themselves.
Bonus EpIsode - On Curiosity And Generative AI
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?