The emotion of grounding is a reminder that emotion isn’t an isolated cognitive experience that can be assessed through a linguistic analysis of someone’s online chats or a digital scan of their facial expression. As with all emotion, a feeling of being grounded is formed in relationship to a person’s past experiences and future expectations, and in reaction to personal and cultural traditions and interpretations of social events.

Grounding is grounded in physical reality. It can’t be operationalized to a quantitative measurement or a checkbox in a database. If an emotion of feeling grounded is separated from its context in human life, it is no longer grounded.

Feeling grounded is about gaining awareness of the context around you, which aligns well with the focus of this podcast, an awareness of the richness of human emotional life.

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.

With sehnsucht, there is a sense of something that’s on the edge of conscious awareness. It can be like remembering that you’ve forgotten something, but without being able to remember exactly what it is that you have forgotten. Another version of sehnsucht is the feeling that a certain place or object holds within it some potential for a better life, without understanding explicitly how that improvement might take place. The transformation we seek through sehnsucht is in a sense something that’s already in our hands, if only we could realize how to activate it.

This week on Stories of Emotional Granularity, I want to do something a little bit different, but something I’ve been meaning to get to ever since the first season of the podcast last spring. I want to 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.

Let’s celebrate the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett, Tiffany Watt Smith, Tim Lomas, and others who are articulating the many distinct emotions that cultures around the world work with.

We are lucky to find happiness when we can, and the best we can do is appreciate moments of happiness while they last, because just as we do not have to power to compel true happiness to arrive through force of will, we cannot prevent happiness from fading away in time.

Perhaps the secret of happiness is that happiness is not something we can achieve. We can make happiness more probable by setting the groundwork for it to arrive, or we can make happiness less likely to occur, but the most we can hope for is to shift the odds in our favor. No matter what we do, happiness is never guaranteed.

Sometimes, happiness happens to happen, and sometimes it doesn’t happen. The difference is a matter of luck, of happenstance. Perhaps we will be happy. Perhaps we will not.

This episode features reflections on happiness by authors Michael Hofeld, Richard Currier, Michael Connolly, and Ethan Gallogly.

This week, we will be talking about anxiety, because anxiety is real. Anxiety is equally 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.

I can’t put it more simply than this: Something feels wrong.

Guests in this episode include anthropologist Richard Currier, an accountant named Laura, ayahuasca guide Jonathan Schwarz, entrepreneur Adam Baruh, and researcher Kristen Donnelly.