Profile-Litost > a very Czech feeling that perfectly describes our experience online

The Feels Guide is a field guide to internet emotion — new feelings, moody machines, emotional design, and wherever, whenever, however emotion and technology mix and mingle.

This week’s feeling hopped from Czech culture to internet culture by way of ubiquitous recommendation algorithms.

🔑 DEFINITION

A state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of oneself, reflected back in a recommendation algorithm.

See also: algorithmic anxiety, feedback theory, I’m in this photo and I don’t like it

📜 A BRIEF HISTORY

Lítost is one of those “untranslatable words”, like saudade in Portuguese or hygge in Danish. The Czech word means something along the lines of “anguish resulting from an acute awareness of our own misery”. The linguistic root is the verb litovat which means to repent or regret. To experience litost requires a certain self-awareness that teeters on the brink of self-loathing where shortcomings are cast into sharp relief.

Offline, the emotion surfaces when we catch a glimpse of how others see us in an offhand comment or when we notice our reflection in a store window as we pass by. Online, it follows us everywhere.

As recommender systems became a pervasive part of life online, so too did the sudden shame of seeing our deepest desires, recent traumas, and darkest fears reflected back. Facebook and Twitter use algorithmically sequenced feeds, displaying what the platforms determined would be most engaging to the user. Spotify and Netflix introduced personalized interfaces that cater to each user’s tastes. And when TikTok’s For You tab, Instagram Explore, Pinterest recommendations converge on the same recommendation, it’s natural to wonder “Is this really me?” and then “Is this who the algorithm thinks I am?” That’s profile-litost.

💬 EXPRESSION

Profile-litost is one of those emotions that is hard to articulate. Once in a while, there’s a targeted ad that cuts deep or a sequence of posts that feel a little too on the mark. When that happens, it’s common to joke “I’m in this photo and I don’t like it”, a reference to a retired Facebook reporting option for hiding photos from the timeline. It’s also appropriate to respond with “I feel attacked” or “it me”.

Because its causes are black-box, the first impulse is to decode the mystery.

• This may take the form of rationalization, explaining away that uncomfortable recommendation because of an errant click on the strangest gifts to buy on Amazon or an atypical late-night, anxiety-fueled exploration of the military method of falling asleep in under one minute.
• For the slightly more tech-savvy, it’s typical to blame others in a household or workplace, “Ah, someone else here is looking at elastic-waist pants, so I’m getting the ads too.”
• Others may respond to the auto-magic recommendation algorithms by attempting some of their own practical magic. This involves developing a folk theory about how the algorithm works, such as “I see more posts from people I recently added”, which then leads to an improvised counterpoint like snoozing or muting new connections for a while.

💗 EXPERIENCE

Profile-litost is like catching a sudden unflattering reflection with your mobile camera at an awkward angle in super high-res which leads to self-loathing at seeing yourself “as you really are”. The feeling appears in your music app recommendations, then pops up in your social media feed as suggested likes, follows you in ads as you browse random websites only to resurface later as you try to make a purchase.

The fortunate few can keep this digital doppelganger at a distance. For others, there’s a more disturbing emotional journey.

1. The shame of self-recognition
2. A flicker of denial in the mental calculations that prove it is not the real you
3. Or defiance accompanied by confounding the algorithm through strategic clicking, unfollowing, and liking
4. A flash of restless anger, which may cause you to lash out at the platform, other users, brands, or yourself
5. Lingering sadness, regret, or self-loathing

🎉 FUN FACT

Spotify is the place where profile-litost may be most evident — you’re confronted with the horror of your own musical taste every week in Discover Weekly. As if that weren’t bad enough, you can get dragged for your musical taste by a bot with How Bad Is Your Spotify? After you log in to Spotify the bot mocks your musical taste as it calculates the results in a twisted mirror-image of Spotify Wrapped.

Since the bot has been “trained on corpus of over two million indicators of objectively good music, including Pitchfork reviews, record store recommendations, and subreddits you’ve never heard of,” it clearly knows best.

🎩 PERSON OF INTEREST

Milan Kundera didn’t invent the word litost, but the Czech author is the person who has explained it with the most resonance. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, when the main character, a student, notices his love interest slowing the pace of her swimming to match his, he sees only his own weakness. That one small moment causes a strong rush of inadequacy, followed by the impulse to lash out. Kundera explains the feeling as, “A state of torment caused by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.”

💡 BIG PICTURE

Pervasive modern recommendations algorithms have translated the untranslatable. An emotion once known only to Czechs (or readers of Kundera) is now a widely understood facet of internet culture.

Rather than being resigned to a constant flicker of self-loathing as a backdrop to your internet experience, try to put profile-litost in perspective. It is a truth universally acknowledged that recommendations are not about you, but about generic tags like age or location or online behaviors that are unreliable at best. While an ad or a post or a song might feel a little too on the nose, it’s actually just a wild guess.

🤔 LEARN MORE

• Read about litost and over one hundred other untranslatable emotions in Tiffany Watt Smith’s Book of Human Emotion
• Watch John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows which offers new words for emotions
• Learn more about “algorithmic folk theories”, the explanations that we come up with to understand how algorithms work on Quartz
• The X-Ambassadors may have captured the essence of litost in their eponymous song

🙈🙈🙈🙈🙈

That’s all the feels for this week!

xoxo

Pamela 💗

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The guide behind the guide

I’m Pamela Pavliscak, a tech emotionographer who studies emotion on the internet. I’m writing a book, All the Feels (Algonquin, 2024), about how technology is changing our emotional life — mostly for the better. I run an emotion tech consultancy called Subjective Labs and teach emotional design at the Pratt Institute in NYC. And I’m starting to share what I learn here and on Substack, Instagram, and Twitter.