There is excellent news, just in time for Xmas (barring some further deterioration in supply lines due to unknown humans resource issues), for my fellow emo orientated individuals: you can now buy a hard copy of a thought experiment gone viral, dedicated to exploring and putting names to indescribable sources of sadness in our world.
To appropriately celebrate this sombreness, here is a short compilation of my melancholic musings made whilst spending time engulfed in this Dictionary.
The Sorrow of Sonder — September 27 2019
A while back, I came across a site called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
On face value, such an enterprise might seem slightly morose, self-indulgent, downright emo and bordering on nihilistic — and some particular entries support this. There is, for example, a word — Lachesism — for internally egging on catastrophic events for the disruption and resulting clarity they might bring about into otherwise mundane everyday life.
But, if you have not yet had the privilege of coming across this site, and have a spare hour or so (ideally more — many words also have accompanying videos, with thoroughly life affirming and almost YouTube-redeeming comments sections), I highly recommend taking a deep dive, as there is much to be taken in.
Firstly, some of the words are so on point it is hard to argue against this Dictionary as an entirely necessary endeavour in describing the human condition.
Morii — the desire to capture a fleeting moment — provides a coherent underlying rationale for a significant amount of content on social media.
Keta — a memory that leaps back into your mind from the distant past — is (for me anyway) such a fundamental and defining emotional experience that it is a wonder it took this long to be named.
Opia — the ambiguous intensity of eye contact — well, you don’t need my help explaining that one.
The site — taken as a whole with its words, videos and comments sections — can be understood as an exploration of the nature of human emotion, and in particular, a meditation on the nature of sorrow itself.
Midding — perhaps my favourite, because of its close proximity both to my last name and also my desired contribution to most social situations — describes the tranquil pleasure of being near but not quite within a gathering: “feeling blissfully invisible yet still fully included, safe in the knowledge that everyone is together and everyone is okay, with all the thrill of being there without the burden of having to be”.
Reading this definition now still fills me with emotion. Back in my heyday, I remember this as describing exactly the experience of early morning comedowns with friends after a day long summer festival or a big night out (or both) — still the most vividly happy experiences of my life, even if they were artificially created and ultimately unsustainable.
It is the necessary absence of this feeling that brings about the sorrow I associate with the word; my life since this time can be largely defined as a journey to try and re-unite with the divinity that was found there, without the shortcuts this time.
Then there is the Dictionary’s most widely known word Sonder — the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. That is a serious word. An incredibly humbling, ego-combating reminder of our place in the world, that is likely to induce some degree of melancholy.
But why? To define such a necessary, outward-turning realisation as inherently sadness-evoking seems somewhat subjective; is Sonder really a feeling that should bring on sorrow? That it does seem to, likely reflects the relentless inflation of the station of the individual within our society: that we are conditioned to believe in our own importance and uniqueness to such an extent that the fact that the person walking by you in the street is probably going through the same emotional highs and lows as you becomes a profound challenge to our sense of self.
But once you get over your ego, once you appreciate the life-affirming breezes of remebering the extent of human complexity, Sonder transforms into a word that can bring about great and profound contentment, perhaps even joy.
I am left convinced that the most fundamental and undefinable human experiences are wrapped in a sense of unavoidable but not overwhelming sadness — a sadness that drives us on rather than pulls us down.
It Might be Time to Normalise Sadness — July 2 2020
Have you noticed the world atm? It’s a bit… yeh.
I’m an optimist. Mainly, because I have been lucky to develop what is a pretty unshakeable belief in an afterlife that is far better than the one we are currently living.
But, I also feel like things are about to get better in this world, fairly soon.
Why the melancholy, then?
Well, I’m not so sure that the world is about to get better for everyone. Perhaps even the majority of people. I could be wrong, and I would like to be wrong.
This #greatawakening that many people are talking about could well gain momentum, sweep us all up and lift us — probably metaphorically but I’m open to it being literally — into a new age of existence.
Or it might not. It might cleave our society into two, taking one half with it to a better place and leaving the other half behind in a place of chaos and confusion. Families, friendships groups, significant others split down the middle, potentially.
Again, only maybe. But it seems appropriate to consider this as a possibility, the way things seem to be going. Even if you are on the right side of such a splitting, how un-conflictingly happy can you really be about it?
So, despite being in as good a place personally as I can say I have been for a long time (it has been a while since I have delved into my emo music collection, which is the best indicator I have available to me), I felt compelled to go back and check my favourite aforementioned manual of melancholy musings.
Mainly, I wanted to see if my favourite words still packed the same punch as before. It hadn’t been updated in ages, so I wasn’t sure if it was still active, and wasn’t expecting to find anything new. But, praise be to the saviour of sadness, there was a fresh entry:
Agnosthesia n. the state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your behavior, as if you were some other person — noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed.
Well, that’s not exactly a ray of sunshine. But, still: oof. The dude who does this site truly is the master of describing all things morose.
I don’t think I’m quite there anymore, thankfully. Maybe it resonates for you, though? Maybe it touches some feeling you had that even the most basic of human experiences seem to have a struggle written into them at the moment.
If so, my observation would be that it would be entirely normal. There is much going on in the world — and much, from what I know, that is about to be revealed — to make us numb.
And this might be what sadness truly is. A numbing of a feeling we have once experienced, and have faith that we will once again reach, just not any time in a future that we can imagine.
It’s not negative as such — I am a firm believer that sadness is natural and unavoidable. It’s just a place that falls short, for reasons we seem powerless to change, from a height that we know is possible.
And so that’s why I say: it’s time to normalise this numbness, this sorrow, this sadness.
Not to succumb to it, or think that this is all that can be, or to shirk at doing the things will help lead us away from it.
But to normalise this feeling as a logical reaction to the world as it is, and as it could very well be in the foreseeable future. To understand that the constant urge to question the validity of that feeling is essentially gaslighting our ability to logically comprehend the world.
It might be time to make melancholy a reality. Take it from a self-confessed emo: it doesn’t mean you can’t still smile.
19 November 2021
I can’t write a re-hashed article without some novel contribution.
So back we go, for a random deep dive into a random attempt to describe something that we know can never be accurately described.
The word this time is Kudoclasm: When Lifelong Dreams Are Brought Down to Earth.
As almost always, the word is both brutal yet reassuring (on an emotionally stable day).
As ways for this dude, the video is beautiful and immaculately constructed: honestly, this is Youtube video goals a conspiracy theorist can only dream of.
Where to go? How long to spend in the comments: which again, without fail, remain steadfastly wholesome? Why this incredibly reassuring sense of emotional security only bale to be constructed around sadness? It is as if all the bullshit has been filtered out by some unknown, divine sieve.
Also immaculate is the referencing, allowing me to easily identify that serene closing track. Time for a new modern classical soundtrack to my refreshed reassurance in the inherent beauty found within obscure sorrow.