Vemödalen > A fear that it’s all be done before
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.
Vemödalen is the latest spin on feeling as if it’s not possible to create anything original.
🔑 DEFINITION
The frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist.
See also: Weltschmertz, ennui, futility
📜 A BRIEF HISTORY
Vemödalen is an emotion word invented in 2013 by John Koenig. First published on his Tumblr blog, Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. On YouTube, Koenig narrates 465 very similar photos taken independently by different photographers. The list of emotions that we all feel but don’t have the vocabulary to express are based on etymologies, prefixes, suffixes, and word roots, but are neologisms.
Inventing words isn’t new. Charles Dickens made up curses to avoid offending Victorian readers. George Orwell invented newspeak to describe talk used to obfuscate rather than illuminate. Before the novel 1984 was published in 1949, no English word gave the same sinister sense, and today the “speak” suffix still indicates dangerously fake language, thanks to Orwell. More recently, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd’s The Meaning of Liff is a “dictionary of things that there aren’t any words for yet” using place names to define emotions that aren’t articulated as a current English word.
It also captures our imagination in the same way that untranslatable emotion words from other languages do. There’s the Finnish concept of sisu, which is a sort of “extraordinary determination in the face of adversity” or the Portuguese saudade, a melancholic longing or nostalgia for a person, place, or thing that is far away. This particular neologism plays on the meme of “Is there a German word for X?” (hint: there usually is) given German’s concise complexity that has prompted English to borrow many words, including schadenfreude, or taking pleasure in the misfortune of another.
The concept of vemödalen, like so many of the world-weary emotions captured in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, has its roots in another era despite its focus on a particularly modern affliction. Vemödalen echoes the Romantic period’s obsession with weltschmertz (a feeling that reality can never satisfy the expectations of the mind), ennui, and longing. The idea that it’s all been done before is, ironically, not new.
It also recalls Walter Benjamin’s work, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which explained how mechanical reproduction devalues the aura of a work of art. And, of course, the art of Andy Warhol challenged the idea that mechanical reproduction saps meaning.
💬 EXPRESSION
Having the precise expression, or le bon mot, is gratifying and explains our collective fascination with new words for new emotions. Vemödalen is one of those words that add shades of nuance but hasn’t entered the vernacular, like some of the other “obscure sorrows” such as sonder.
💗 EXPERIENCE
We long to be different, to stand out from the crowd. With over 7 billion people on the planet, being unique can seem like an exercise in futility though. Vemödalen vexes us: “the same sunset, the same waterfall, the same curve of a hip, the same closeup of an eye can turn a unique subject into something hollow and pulpy and cheap, like a mass-produced piece of furniture you happen to have assembled yourself.”
The common thread among the “sorrows” is inadequacy, frustration, and impotence where Koenig describes how each is “bagged, tagged, and tranquilized” then “released gently into the subconscious” to haunt us.
A shift in perspective can help us to resist hopelessness, however. As Koenig suggests, “It should be a comfort that we’re not so different, that our perspectives so neatly align, that these same images keep showing up again and again.” Vemödalen can reveal our common humanity.
❝ QUOTE
“That you are here — that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” Walt Whitman
💡 BIG PICTURE
Vemödalen can lead to frustration if we focus on the futility of contributing something original. We can, instead, take that as a creative challenge and find something new in a well-worn theme, we are each adding to the story of human existence. We are connected by a common appreciation of beauty. Or we can revel in our collective appreciation of beauty and shared meaning.
Either way, adopting more nuanced and specific emotion words can change the way we feel ourselves, by drawing our attention to fleeting sensations we have previously ignored. Think of descriptions of emotions like the weather. There are dark, cloudy days portending a downpour and bright, sunny days filled with cotton candy clouds. using the word, cloudy, doesn’t quite express it and it doesn’t let you plan ahead for that umbrella.
🤔 LEARN MORE
- Did you catch the passing mention of vemödalen in season 2, episode 4 of The White Lotus where Portia laments the impossibility of experiencing anything that hasn’t been captured on Instagram?
- No coffeeshops named after this obscure sorrow yet but there’s a little-known Scottish alternative rock band with the name
- Read this deep dive into How Fictionaries are Liberating the World in The Guardian
🟣 🟪 🟠 🟧 🟢 🟩 🟡 🟨
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.
