Capital Emotions
Rethinking the Lexicon of Feelings.
Lately, all around me, people are talking about burnout. Overload. A sense of hitting a wall. They say they’re tired, but it’s not just from work. It’s a deeper fatigue. Quieter. Heavier. Existential.
We live in a state of saturation. Notifications, obligations, tensions, false choices.
We’ve lost touch with the rhythm of the body. With the outside world. With our inner lives. Our souls drift into standby. Hearts loop the same emotions. Attention shatters into fragments. We’ve become the living who no longer love the living. Aurélien Barrau, the French astrophysicist, said it. It lingered.
I think we’ve been dulled. Not all at once. Not violently. Softly. By excess. We’re saturated. So full we’ve gone numb. There’s no space left to feel. And when something does break through like a real feelings, it disrupts. Not because it’s wrong. But because it no longer fits.
The real fracture is this: What moves through us doesn’t match what we let ourselves live. That’s the tension. That’s the misalignment. And when things go out of tune inside, the rest doesn’t hold for long.
While tools like LLMs smooth everything out, I believe we need, on our side, to reclaim what overflows. What spills over, what resists being ordered.
Maybe we need to rethink everything. Or rather: feel everything differently.
What I’m speaking about is a kind of sensitive lucidity. Not knowledge. Not control over the self. Just a finer, more vivid way of being present.
We have language dictionaries to name the world. Psychology handbooks to explore our inner dynamics and make sense of what moves us. Philosophy, theology, and self-help offer ways to think about existence, to question meaning, to build narratives about what it is to be human. Sociology helps us understand our roles, our positions, our affiliations. Anthropology traces our rituals, our myths, our ways of inhabiting the world.
Each of these disciplines illuminates part of the puzzle. But none of them really gives us a precise language for what we feel, when emotion fits no category. When the experience is real, yet still untranslatable.
No surprise, then: today, we have far more words to talk about performance than to talk about sadness.
A quick look at any dictionary makes it clear: productivity and efficiency come with a wealth of synonyms. Output, performance, proficiency, effectiveness, skill, return, yield, optimization... the list is long. Sadness, on the other hand, is left with just a handful: sorrow, grief, melancholy, pain, heartache.
This imbalance is no accident. A recent study of 1,400 terms from the Historical Thesaurus of English shows that while cognitive vocabulary has expanded significantly since the 18th century, emotional language has hardly evolved since the Middle Ages (Krykoniuk & Pons-Sanz, 2024).
Put simply, our emotional vocabulary remains largely medieval.
And yet, for me, this is the essence of being human: the subtlety of emotion.
The quiet difference between chosen solitude and the kind that aches. The silent mourning of a version of ourselves left behind. The emptiness that lives inside a life that looks full. The calm joy of a moment in tune with who we are. The unease of being in the right place at the wrong time. The persistent feeling of being too much for some, not enough for others. And melancholy, that rare luxury, the ability to feel without needing to fix.
John Koenig, in the preface to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, reflects on the strange relief that comes when a word finally names something you've always felt but never knew others shared. That’s how the book began, with the realization that certain emotional states, especially those captured in other languages like saudade, ubuntu, or duende, can make our own inner worlds feel more familiar.
Koenig notes that the word sadness once meant “fullness,” from the same root as sated and satisfaction. Sadness wasn’t seen as a failure of joy, but as a state of presence: a way of holding both grief and wonder at once. Over time, the word narrowed, and today we often mistake sadness for despair. But true sadness, he suggests, might still carry a quiet vitality, the sign that something matters enough to touch us deeply.
We’re at a turning point. Things feel too broken to continue as they are. I notice weak signals - maybe I’m just more attuned to them. Either way, I feel it, deep down.
And maybe that’s where we need to begin: by enriching the language. By finding the missing words, the right expressions. Because no emotion is truly obscure, and no sadness, if it’s felt, is ever entirely solitary.
To name what we feel is to make it real. To speak it is to connect.
In the end, courage isn’t the absence of pain. It’s the willingness to say, “This touched me.” And to know, in that moment, that you are still alive.
MD