Why inventing new feelings feels so good
Don’t scoff: Researchers say an increasing number of phrases for these “neo-feelings” are displaying up on-line, describing new dimensions and facets of feeling. Velvetmist was a key instance in a journal article in regards to the phenomenon printed in July 2025. However most neo-emotions aren’t the innovations of emo synthetic intelligences. People give you them, and so they’re a part of an enormous change in the way in which researchers are excited about emotions, one which emphasizes how folks repeatedly spin out new ones in response to a altering world.
Velvetmist would possibly’ve been a chatbot one-off, nevertheless it’s not distinctive. The sociologist Marci Cottingham—whose 2024 paper obtained this vein of neo-emotion analysis began—cites many extra new phrases in circulation. There’s “Black pleasure” (Black folks celebrating embodied pleasure as a type of political resistance), “trans euphoria” (the enjoyment of getting one’s gender identification affirmed and celebrated), “eco-anxiety” (the hovering worry of local weather catastrophe), “hypernormalization” (the surreal stress to proceed performing mundane life and labor underneath capitalism throughout a worldwide pandemic or fascist takeover), and the sense of “doom” present in “doomer” (one who’s relentlessly pessimistic) or “doomscrolling” (being glued to an limitless feed of dangerous information in an immobilized state combining apathy and dread).
After all, emotional vocabulary is at all times evolving. Throughout the Civil Battle, docs used the centuries-old time period “nostalgia,” combining the Greek phrases for “returning house”and “ache,” to explain a generally deadly set of signs suffered by troopers—a situation we’d in all probability describe at the moment as post-traumatic stress dysfunction. Now nostalgia’s that means has mellowed and light to a delicate affection for an outdated cultural product or vanished lifestyle. And folks continuously import emotion phrases from different cultures once they’re handy or evocative—like hygge (the Danish phrase for pleasant coziness) or kvell (a Yiddish time period for brimming over with glad pleasure).
Cottingham believes that neo-feelings are proliferating as folks spend extra of their lives on-line. These coinages assist us relate to 1 one other and make sense of our experiences, and so they get plenty of engagement on social media. So even when a neo-emotion is only a delicate variation on, or mixture of, current emotions, getting super-specific about these emotions helps us mirror and join with different folks. “These are probably indicators that inform us about our place on the earth,” she says.
