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I wish that intimacy could be the other way. Like, I wish I could find out people's deepest, darkest secrets, and then over years, as we build up trust, I could learn what their name is. Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.
My guest today is John Koenig, a writer, graphic designer, video creator, and voice actor. John's the author of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, where he coined a series of emotion words that brilliantly describe human experiences that have previously escaped the English language.
If I didn't have little labels to help me remember certain things, it's clouds of in darkness in your head, basically. But if you have a word, you can just put a little handle on it somehow through some mysterious magic process of language in the brain. and you can share it with people. I'm so excited to have a chance to talk to you.
I have read so many words and sentences and paragraphs where my first thought is, I wish I could write like that. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I think we have to start at the place where... I first became aware of your work, which was when an amazing student named Morgan introduced me to the word sonder, which I imagine is how most people come across you these days.
Definitely. That is far and away the most popular definition. It's taken on a life of its own and, you know, become a real word, if anything. Tell me what Sonder means in your words. So Sonder is the awareness that every random passerby... is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. And you are just an extra in their epic story that's taking place all around you. And there are billions of people out there, billions of epic stories.
And you'll never get a chance to really only just scrape the surface of that, which is why it's a sorrow. You're missing out on just so much story out there, so much humanity. It's so fascinating that you think that's a sorrow because... I had the exact opposite reaction to it. Really? Just the joy of how much is out there? Yes, it's incredible that every single person that you come across...
has encountered a lifetime of loves and fears and hopes and dreams and heartaches that we've only scratched the surface of. And it reminded me that... I even only have a tiny little bit of that knowledge about the people that I know best. Right. It's sort of like looking up at the night sky or something. Just the enormity of just everyday life is just astonishing to me. How did you come up with this word?
Strictly, the etymology is from French, sonder, which is sort of like the English to sound. It's to plumb or to probe. And also in German, it means special. So that's how you get sonder commando in World War II.
But how I came up with it is almost always insomnia that gets me really in the mood to write. So in this case, it was three in the morning and I was just thinking of when you're... driving on the highway and you see just this little pod of humanity this alternate universe that just sort of cruises past you slowly and you notice that maybe the person is sort of lost in thought or they're talking to themselves or they're singing a song or they're arguing with the person next to them
and you're just like god i would just love to know where they're going what life they're leading and you're on parallel courses just by sheer coincidence, by happenstance, and then they're going to just take their exit and you're going to take your exit and you're never going to see them again. But for that one split second, you just have this glimpse into an alternate universe. And I'm just, I don't know, hungry to know what that is.
How often do you experience Sonder? Constantly. It's just, it's overwhelming to me. I don't know. It's like the old Get Smart opening credits where there's just doors beyond doors beyond doors and it just keeps going. It makes me sad in a way that I know I can only step into the first or the second door and then beyond that it's just sort of almost not my business. There have been philosophers that have described when you encounter people it makes you
It doesn't satiate you. It makes you still hungrier somehow for more humanity, for more of them. And I definitely feel that. Isn't that part of the joy of learning, though? This is one of the reasons I became a psychologist, is the endless complexity of human beings is just endlessly fascinating. And it's also what I have...
told people in the past when they've asked, well, how can anyone ever commit to a monogamous relationship? Won't you get bored with one person for 50 years? No, Saunders, the reason why. Yeah. Yeah, it's like you're exploring a house with infinite rooms and you don't know what's there. I think my book, it's kind of a companion piece, if anything, to your book. Think again. Because your subtitle was The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know. Mine is the...
recursive, not knowing what you don't know. You know, it's just like, I just constantly, you know, you want to feel at home in the universe. You want to feel like I'm an earthling and I belong here, but you know that you're going to see. like a handful of places in your lifetime and know them really well. You're only going to meet, I don't know, 10,000 people in any meaningful way at best. Maybe only 100, I don't know. It's this constant feeling of scratching the surface.
That if you really dig down deep and try to get at the truth, it's just, it evades you. Like trying to, you know, capture a photo of an electron or something. It's also like trying to look straight at the Mona Lisa and see the smile that you can only catch out of the corner of your eye.
Yeah, yeah. I think they say that about the Andromeda galaxy too. You can see it, but only if you look away from it, because it's just, it's too faint. I think that so much compassion comes out of an understanding of Sonder. I think now more than at any point in my lifetime, we're seeing so many people fall victim to binary bias. where they just collapse the complexity of other humans into this sort of good versus evil or smart versus stupid or moral versus amoral or immoral. And that...
I think is one of the reasons that we're so divided right now is people can't see the shades of gray in others. And I think, Sander, it's a forcing function. to recognize that people are complex. When you flatten a three-dimensional human and make them 2D, you lose the ability to care about them. And I think we need an antidote to that. And I think...
Sonder might be the best one-word antidote I've come across. Doesn't that give you hope, John? It does give me hope. As the creator of that word? It does, but at the same time, what's on the other side of that? Like, why do we need to reduce each other in the way we do?
Is it possible to go through the world and just... uh have a real sense of the the depth and humanity of other people like is that a practical thing to do or is that just going to lead to some sort of sclerosis and it closes all of us off because i could see the depth of your pain and how
what I do affects you and how my words mean something completely different to what the words you're hearing are. That's just so much to think about. I don't think I could get through the day if like Sonder was what I felt every second of the day. I think there might be a difference, and this is true for empathy too, between understanding it and feeling it. Yeah, that's true. I don't think I want to feel Sonder every minute, to your point. Right. But I do want it to be there in the background.
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How did you get into the art of inventing words? Kind of something I've always done. I used to make up nonsense words with a couple of friends in high school and just, I don't know, had a lot of fun with it. I think it's because I grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, in an international school. almost as many nationalities as there were people. And so there was just tons of different languages flowing all the time. There was really no one culture that I absorbed into myself.
And so I think it just kind of naturally gravitated toward the power of other... languages to open experience like if you learn about ubuntu or duende or schadenfreude even in german i i loved finding lists of those and then i was like oh if you can do that and you can have a word for almost anything and really add some grain to your emotional language. Where else could we go with this? And so I think that's where I just sort of.
you know started almost as a joke i was just you know making fun of like how neurotic i am i'm mysteriously sad watching the end credits of saturday night live and i can't put my finger on it but i'm going to put a name to it
Or feeling mysteriously disappointed when I used to live in a rough neighborhood and I would come down to my car in the morning and notice that it hadn't been broken into. And I felt a little bit like, oh, well, I worry about it all the time and it still hasn't happened. Like, I don't know how to unpack that.
that feeling, but. That's supposed to be relief, John. Relief. I know. I know. I think you're extraordinarily talented and skilled at, you know, first, you know, describing human experiences that no one has the vocabulary to. to make sense of, and then coming up with words that capture them. And I have so many words that I want to talk about from reading the dictionary. It is hands down the most riveting dictionary ever written.
Thank you. Without question. My favorite moments are then when you go off and riff on one of the words and take us beyond the definition. And I think that's when you really start to dive into the psychology of where does this emotion come from and why do we experience it and how does it...
affect us. The only thing that really puzzled me was the title. Oh, yeah. And I think this is a broader commentary on our back and forth about Sonder. I didn't find all or even most of the words to be obscure sorrows. I thought they were obscure emotions. And I read in the introduction, you said, this is not a book about sadness. Yeah. That you wanted to be value neutral. I didn't know, actually. You said the original definition of sadness traces back to meaning fullness? Yeah.
yeah it's from satis the ancient rome in latin which is the the you know originally meant fullness your cup was running running over you know it's the same root that gave us sated and satisfaction it's just a completely different axis instead of like emotions that I want to own and ones that I want to just be averse to. So I think there's something beautiful. These are things that made my cup.
fill in some way or another and that's the definition of sadness that i use and i think that's my philosophy toward emotions in general is that you know if you feel something that's a kind of joy even if you're weeping it's a subset of joy Why then call it a dictionary of obscure sorrows as opposed to obscure emotions or obscure joys?
That communicates empathy for being a human being and how overwhelming and confusing it is. Even when you feel a joy, and you're the only one to feel it, that can turn into a kind of sorrow. Or if you feel a joy and it's fleeting and you're trying to hold on to it, that again is, you know, kind of in context, it turns into a sorrow. The human condition is a tough situation to be in. And so that's, I think that's what the title.
tries to do is sort of communicates hey you know you're not alone we've all been there i think this book in in some ways it just is like a map on a napkin or something to make people feel a little less alone in the wilderness I never really thought about this, but you're right. I also read to feel less alone. And so I guess what you're conveying is this is a description of the human condition. Yeah. Or one human's condition, at least.
But it's not just one humans because on almost every page, there's a word where I had the reaction, I can't believe that somebody else has felt this and named it and characterized it. So one of the ones I loved most was Swerza, which you defined as a feeling of quiet amazement that you exist at all.
Yeah, a sense of gratitude that you were even born in the first place, that you somehow emerged alive and breathing despite all odds, having won an unbroken streak of reproductive lotteries that stretches all the way back to the beginning of life itself. And this from Spanish suerte. which is luck and fuerza, which is force. So a luck force that you kind of sense in the air sometimes. Sometimes I'll wake up in the morning or, you know, I'll just finish a workout even and think, wow.
What are the odds? They're infinitesimally small. Yeah. That I would exist. What are the odds that every single one of your ancestors made it long enough to reproduce? And it stretches back to the primordial ooze. We don't know where we came from, but there's an unbroken chain connecting us to that. That's awe for me. Why did you describe it as quiet amazement?
I think because you just don't see many movies where people are talking about like, oh my God, I'm alive. That's great. I think it has to be a private moment because it's faintly embarrassing to just be gazing at your hand and being like, oh Jesus, man, like it's a dorm floor, like, you know. two joints deep kind of thing but i feel it all the time my hypothesis is that
There might be such a thing as feeling Swersa too often. I was thinking about some research by Sonia Lubomirsky and her colleagues showing that people get more of a happiness boost from doing a weekly gratitude journal than a daily. Yeah, that makes sense. This is still an open question, why? But I think part of what goes on there is that when people do the daily gratitude exercise, they start to run out of meaningful things to be thankful for. And they're like, well, I'm grateful for this pen.
I appreciate the ability to make a list of things I appreciate, whereas you do it once a week and you have a bunch of new events in your life that you can pause and savor. What do you make of that? Do you think there's an optimal frequency or is there such a thing as swears that too often? One of the first definitions I wrote actually is chirosclerosis, which is when suddenly you are aware that you're happy.
Kairos is an opportune moment in ancient Greece and sclerosis is a hardening. So it's when you feel your heart happiness, you become aware of it and then it just like dissolves slowly. I think there's something about turning your context into text that weakens it a little bit. It's vivisection. You're trying to.
unpack something that should be just real and alive and you should just let it be. So I think most of the time we just need to let things be and don't try to analyze them too much or even just notice they're there. Just let it be. You've just... And that sentence basically decimated my entire existence. There's nothing I can let be. I can't even listen to a song without asking, but what did that lyric mean? And why did the artist...
Write it that way, which drives some of my friends and family members crazy. Yeah, me too. It's definitely my mode. Which is, I guess, why we both need to be reminded that some things are okay to actually just experience without analyzing. Yep. There will be an answer. Just let it be. The Beatles gave you the answer you needed on that one.
This reminds me of another word that I've described many times, and I'm so thrilled now to have a term for, which is what you call loose left. Most of the time when I love a book. And this is different from a TV show or a movie where it's paced for you. You don't watch a great movie or an amazing TV show on 2X. You watch it at regular speed. Whereas a book, if you're loving it...
I've had the experience countless times of just wanting to race through it because I can't wait to see what happens next. And then I realized that... I start to feel that there are only 60 or 70 pages left, and the end is imminent. And I start to slow down because there's an asymptote approaching.
I feel this a lot as an anticipatory emotion that I'm going to be loose left. I don't want to leave the world and the characters and the author's vision of them behind. And so I stay with it as long as possible. This sense of being loose left. Does this also apply to parasocial relationships? Do people have it when they listen to a great podcast, for example?
Oh, I'm sure. For a lot of people out there, that's their primary sort of social energy they're getting is from podcasts and from silly little YouTube shows. I think this is part of the appeal of listening to co-hosts who have a relationship. there's a weekly experience of rekindling that connection. As opposed to when the guest rotates, even if you bring them back, the magic might not exist in round two. That's fascinating, yeah. Let me ask you about another one. Is it Zeelschmers?
zeal schmurtz yeah goal pain i think that's that translates to yes yeah so i definitely felt this when the uh dictionary was published. It's the dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream. You're working up toward it. And then when it finally happens, I don't necessarily want to get there.
You could have zoomed in on a few of these and written an entire book about them and the philosophy or the worldview that they formed together. Because the way that you've organized the chapters, there are some overarching themes. But... You also, you could have gone on and on just inventing more emotion words. How did you know when you were done? There was this, I don't know, a process of just like...
Like when you're watching droplets of rain on a window and you notice how when little ones get too close together and they join into bigger ones. And that's kind of what happened here where I have lots of little definitions, but then they're so close that they actually. they fold into something, a wider truth or a deeper truth or something about relationships or whatever. So sort of naturally it started out.
pretty shallow and just a high number, like a thousand definitions. But as I went through and I realized, oh, there's actually a parallel here and I used a water metaphor here and here, I wonder what that means. And so it was just sort of a, almost an evolutionary. process of some of these ideas taking shape, which is a really exciting thing to have happen for an author working for 10 years on something is that you can feel the book evolve as you evolve as a person.
Say it again, the raindrops coming together, boop. Raindrops on a window. I've never thought about that before, but even that, that is a word that needs to be coined. Blooping. Is that feeling blooping? I'm like, oh, that feeling. I remember that from like seven years ago. And here it is again. There must be something there. Well, this is the counterpoint to Zeal Schmertz then, which is...
Yeah, there's a dread of getting what you want because this is why people always remind us like, it's the journey, not just the destination, right? That the process of creating something is often more enjoyable and meaningful than the... The moment of completing it. But once it's done, you actually get to share it. Yeah, this is true. Yeah, come out of my little cave.
John, talk to me about liberosis. You defined it as the desire to care less about things. Yeah, I definitely feel that. This one I feel is amplified now. Yes. For a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah, I just want to tune out the news and I wish I could just force my fists to just relax from the world or from the model that I have in my head of the world.
It's about relaxing your grip on your life and holding it loosely and playfully, you know, keeping it in the air like a volleyball. I wish I could live that way. I feel like a junkyard dog just refusing to let go of some of these questions. As soon as I read this description of liberosis, I thought about Viktor Frankl writing about man's search for meaning and how sometimes you could want something too much and sort of an excess of motivation would...
in some circumstances stand in the way of getting the very thing that you were pursuing. I think that's just how we program people. Just aim directly at happiness and just get that. We are Americans. This is what we do. But, you know, obviously aiming it for happiness is the surest way not to get it. It reminds me of some research that came out in the early stages of COVID.
I had assumed that the optimists would be the people who were thriving the most during those difficult circumstances. But they weren't. The people who managed to maintain their well-being and demonstrate the highest levels of resilience. were the people who were able to find flow, who got into those states of total absorption where they lost track of everything else. And I think for me, liberosis is part of the appeal of a flow state.
i was writing the book for the last 10 years and so that was my escape is to to dive into words and get into the flow that way and make youtube videos and so i think that's probably another reason i felt the zeal schmerz as you know getting done with the book is that I didn't have that flow state left. Let me ask you about a few others. One is justing, which felt like a great rebuttal to a lot of the self-help movement. Yeah.
adjusting is the habit of telling yourself that just one tweak could solve all of your problems if you bought that backpack if you had the right haircut if you found the right group of friends everything would be would be better i think this is a very american or at least north american at least western point of view just being an inveterate tweaker of lifestyle
I think that's true. It's related to what Tal Ben-Shahar calls the arrival fallacy, where you imagine that once I achieve this goal or once I move to this place... everything will be different. I'll feel like I've arrived. And the reality is, as Adam Sandler put it in that hilarious SNL skit, like when you go to Italy, if you're sad at home.
You're still the same sad you on vacation. At the Coliseum. That was great. I love that. A few others that I just wanted to get your comment on. One of which can... both pull, I guess, pull us out of the present and remind us to focus on it. Is it debut? Yeah, debut. It's the awareness that this moment will become a memory, that you're going to look back on this time, you're going to remember it, and it's going to mean something very different then. And so you try to like...
Try to put yourself in that point of view while you're in this memory. I mean, I have two young kids. I feel this constantly. Like I'm taking photos. I know I'm going to string those photos together into some sort of mythologized idea of what this period of life. was, but at the same time, like here I am in the present, I'm in the golden age now. I can't force myself to have that meaning. I can't give it the meaning, any other meaning than what it is right now.
It's helpful for me from a planning perspective to say, if all future moments will become past memories, then how do I want to arrange my life? And what are the moments that I want to make into memories? What about this one? Is it apriese? Apriese. It's the feeling of loss that you never had a chance to meet a certain person before they died. Yeah. I've talked about this one with so many people, never had a term for it. Yeah.
The pivotal figure in my writing life is Robert Bly. He's a poet who wrote a bestseller in the early 90s, Iron John, very psychological and Jungian. I never lived in the right continent, and I never got a chance to know him deeply. He was my grandfather's brother. Oh, wow. And I never knew my grandfather, and I never really knew my great uncle, but he inspired me to become a writer.
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So John, I want to jump to a lightning round. All right. Of all the words you've invented, which one do you think is the worst one to live your life by? There's one malotype, which is the exact kind of person who you do not want to be. Because they remind you of all your flaws. Exactly. Yes. So I don't think that's a good way to exist. And also don't hang out with your malotype. Yeah, exactly.
just ignore this person. If you could choose a word that you think best captures a way of living a good life, which one would you choose? One of my favorites is called Ambedo, which is sort of a mysterious... trance of emotional clarity when your mind is sort of caught in just a period of calm and you just overcome by this sense of This is real. This is happening now. And we try so hard to distract ourselves with the stories we tell ourselves. But reality is happening anyway.
And it's very rare that you are just accidentally stumbled into this accidental meditation. But I think it's delicious when that happens. Is there a word that you've rethought? I think there's a kind of navel-gazing quality to this book, especially the second chapter is about identity, and it's about yourself, basically, and what you think of yourself. And by the end of that chapter, I feel kind of claustrophobic for some reason. Like, there's just so much... in there, but I think...
There's so much meaning to be found in community and relationship and ritual and a lot of these more collective sources of meaning that just by virtue of me being introverted, I didn't tap as much into that. that wellspring of meaning as I did when I wrote the book. I think some of that is inevitable, though, when writing about emotions, because they do live inside our heads.
and in our bodies to some extent. A question that Morgan asked me when we were talking about sonder that I thought was really interesting, she wondered if there's such a thing as reverse sondering. when you present your complexity to someone else and invite them to see you in 3D as opposed to in 2D. Yeah. Man, that feels so risky, doesn't it? Wouldn't it feel great to be known and to feel comfortable just being who you are?
you know, in all your glory. That takes so much trust and so much sensitivity. Again, that's sort of an overwhelming thing. When you were talking earlier about Sonder, I was thinking about the... The fast friends procedure that Art Aaron and colleagues created, which you probably know the New York Times article on how to fall in love with anyone. Yeah, the certain questions that you ask. Yeah, exactly. The 36 questions that are sort of progressively more vulnerable.
vulnerable and personal. And that seems like sometimes overly structured, but a version of sort of opening the door for somebody else to like sonder away. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. What is a question you have for me? Again, your book, Think Again, is a kind of bizarro version of my book in some small way. I have a problem with overanalyzing and questioning everything and questioning my thought processes. And as you recommend thinking like a scientist and how do we know that, you know?
Rethinking is the name of the podcast, right? There's a footnote on like the last page of that book saying the big unanswered question here is when rethinking should end. I would love to know the answer to that question. And if you had written another chapter or another book answering that question, what would be your answer? You caught me because I originally had planned a chapter on overthinking.
Oh, yeah. And I didn't feel I had good enough material to write it. Interesting. And so I went back to the drawing board. I rethought that chapter a bunch of times. And then I decided, you know what? Like, I'm not there yet, and I'm not going to have figured this out by the time the book comes out. And maybe I'll take it on in another place one day. I hope you do, because it haunts me.
I do feel for people who think too much, but I fear for people who think too little. This is true. There was a psychologist, Susan Nolan Hoeksema, who wrote a book called Women Who Think Too Much. which was based on her research showing gender differences in... depression that were traceable in part to a tendency among women to ruminate, which is not surprising given the world we live in that puts pressure on women to present everything perfectly.
But I think the insights in that book are applicable to all genders. And I think one of the practical ahas I had after reading the Nolan Hooks in my work was... There's a difference between rethinking that leads you to fresh perspectives and new insights and rethinking where you're cycling through the same old thoughts. And I think the former is reflection.
And the latter is rumination. Right. Just chewing. Yeah, exactly. So one of my stopping rules is if you go a 10-minute window without having a novel thought, it's time to either put it away. change the channel, go talk to someone else or read something new or go for a walk and try to get access to a new frame because you've passed the point of learning. Yeah.
Yeah, that's another one of my definitions is altshmirtz is when you're just tired of your old same old issues that you keep chewing over. And like a dog, you want to just go to the backyard and just dig up some fresher pain you might have buried long ago. Yeah, definitely feel that. Yes, well put. If you really want to understand something, your learning is never complete. Right.
I'm just very well aware that that language is a tool and science is a tool. I have to sort of remind myself that it's OK if it's provisional, as you say, or if it's good enough for now or good enough to share. I think sometimes people hear the idea that everything is provisional and they say, well, why bother at all? Because we're getting closer to the truth because...
We're discovering things that people can use to make their life better. That's a worthwhile endeavor, even if we're only approximating the truth or if we're going to unlearn some of the things we thought we had learned last year. Yeah, that's a great perspective. It could be. All right, John, I got to ask you about one more word to close on. Is it tiris? Tiris, yeah. That's the last.
definition in the book and it's the bitter seed awareness that all things must end the the metaphor there for me is you know honeybees they they only live like three months at most and they do their work without questioning it and they they share their little bits of sweetness that they found out in the world and in the end their honey is the only thing that
that doesn't go bad it doesn't expire it's still always just as sweet and i think there's just something something really beautiful about that so that's where the book ends Well, John, this has been every bit as poignant as I hoped it would be. You're just so full of wisdom. And I think...
I think the world is a more thoughtful place because your words and ideas and emotional experiences are in it. Well, likewise. Thank you so much. I'm a huge fan, and this has been such a pleasure of a conversation. Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is part of the TED Audio Collective, and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley Ma and Asia Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar.
Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hans Dale Sue and Allison Leighton Brown. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Samaya Adams, Roxanne Hylash, Ban Ban Cheng, Julia Dickerson. Tansika Sungmanivong and Whitney Pennington Rogers. This is just a fundamental maybe difference between us. Bizarro Adam Grant. Yeah, that's me. Yes, exactly. When I say goodbye, you want to say bad bye.
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