Rare words for complicated feelings
1. Sonder: the realization that each passerby has a life just as vivid and complex as your own.
2. Opia: the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable.
3. Monachopsis: the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place.
4. Enouement: the bittersweet feeling of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turned out, and not being able the tell your past self.
5. Vellichor: the strange wistfulness of used bookshops.
6. Rubatosis: the unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.
7. Kenopsia: the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people, but is now abandoned and quiet.
8. Mauerbauertraurigkeit: the inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like.Â
9. Jouska: a hypothetical conversation you compulsively play out in your head.
10. Chrysalism: the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.
11. Vemodalen: the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos exist already.Â
12. Anecdoche: a conversation in which everyone is talking, but no one is listening.Â
13. Ellipsism: a sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history turns out.Â
14. Kuebiko: a state of exhaustion inspired by senseless acts of violence.Â
15. Lachesism: a desire to be struck by disaster - survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire.Â
16. Exulansis: the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it.Â
17. Adronitis: frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone.
18. Rukkehrunruhe: the feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it rapidly fading from your awareness.Â
19. Nodus tollens: the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense anymore.Â
20. Onism: the frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time.Â
21. Liberosis: the desire to care less about things.Â
22. Altschmerz: weariness with the same old issues you’ve always had - the same boring flaws and anxieties you’ve been gnawing at for years.Â
23. Occhiolism: the awareness of the smallness of your perspective.Â