Season 4 of Stories of Emotional Granularity coming Soon
Welcome back to Stories of Emotional Granularity.
Stories of Emotional Granularity is a podcast that surveys the diversity of subjective human experience.
Diversity is one of the many words that has fallen out of favor in elite political circles this year. It’s searched for and censored in US federal government documents, as businesses and universities who persist in using the term are threatened with legal action by the US Department of Justice.
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 a more mature understanding of the world. Our lives become more complex. Those who seek to centralize power regard such complexity as an ideological threat. They prefer simple storylines that are easier to manipulate, narratives of emotions in childhood’s primary colors of anger and fear.
At the same time, venture capitalists have been pouring money into projects of artificial intelligence that attempt to reduce the lush fabric of human emotional experience into a rough, threadbare scrap of its former self. As businesses, these enterprises have been losing tremendous amounts of money, but in social terms, they have had great success. Vast numbers of artists, writers, designers, researchers, and other thinkers have been professionally marginalized, or have even completely lost their work as executives looking for quick and easy wins have seized upon digital simulation of human experience, including human emotion, as a way to cut their way to profitability. This upheaval paves the way for professional dependence on generative AI, so that when the cost of digital imitation of human work increases, a fortune can be made.
Stories of Emotional Granularity has been off the air as I have been grappling with the consequences of these social trends. I’m coming back for a fourth season of the podcast, however, because it’s never been more vital to define and defend more nuanced modes of feeling and relating to each other.
In this season, we will confront anger, but also reflect on the more vulnerable emotion of bewilderment. We will hear from people coping with imposter syndrome and the playful feeling of humor. We will discuss the emotions of humble humanity, confront guilt and anger, jealousy and envy. We will face the loss of feeling bereft. We will address our grief, and come to the emotion of the embrace of death even as we continue to live.
Through it all, you’ll hear honest to goodness people, no digitized voices. No simulations of humanity.
There’s a lot more to emotion than good and bad, happy and sad. Come back soon to hear more stories of emotional granularity.