"I mean, sometimes I like feeling nothing but sometimes it's it's fun to feel something."

Thanks to Lem, in the previous post, for pointing to this video, which has Nathan Fielder exploring the concept of "cringe."

Back in 2013, I blogged about the word "cringe." People were admiring "cringe-inducing" comedy, notably "The Office," which I wouldn't watch, because it made me feel bad. I mean, I like to feel something, but not bad.

Alexithymia.

I'm reading "My Fiancé Won’t Touch Me. Should I Still Marry Him? Our Ask the Therapist columnist, Lori Gottlieb, advises a 65-year-old reader who loves her partner but is physically and emotionally unsatisfied" (NYT).

From the letter writer:

Our therapist and I suspect undiagnosed alexithymia (or difficulty in experiencing and describing emotions), while he defensively attributes it to mere “emotional reserve.” After a year of failed couples counseling, we are living in a completely platonic relationship.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh — who has long coached girls' basketball teams — channels the emotions of female athletes.

From his opinion for the majority in West Virginia v. B.P.J.,  allowing states to provide separate women’s and men’s sports teams defined by biological sex:

Some might ask: What is the harm in allowing an additional athlete to compete in women’s or girls’ sports? That sentiment, though understandable, misunderstands the nature and reality of sports. 

Sports are highly competitive and generally zero sum. At almost every turn, someone wins and someone loses. Every athlete who makes a team takes a roster spot from another athlete. Every player who earns playing time reduces the playing time of a teammate. Every player who makes the starting lineup sidelines another who remains on the bench. Every competitor who wins a race or competition deprives another athlete of that victory, or medal, or prize. Every team that wins because of an added player means that another team has lost because of that added player. Every player who makes all-conference beats out another player who does not. Every student who earns an athletic scholarship takes that opportunity away from another student. And so on. 

Women and girls who play sports care deeply about all of those things. They obsess about them.

"[Melinda] French Gates has said she met Epstein once and found him so repugnant that she had nightmares afterwards."

"I ask what had so chilled her. Her demeanour changes rapidly. She looks as if she is about to cry. It is upsetting to witness a woman of such unusual self-possession suddenly lose her poise. She turns away, to look at the lake outside her window, and I can see her attempt to compose herself."

I'm reading "'Have you ever been around someone you just know is evil?' Melinda French Gates on meeting Jeffrey Epstein, giving away billions, and her post-divorce peace," by Sophie McBain in The Guardian and my incredulity is sky high.

You can see her attempt to compose herself? I'm not looking at her. I'm just reading your words. But what I see is some phony-baloney acting. And silly writing. Which continues:

“My heart is racing,” she says after a moment, fluttering her hand over her chest.

Fluttering her hand over her chest? Really? This sounds like a comical drag performance of femininity. I'd like to turn away and look at a lake, but I keep reading:

Are you "upset" or just unsettled?

I'm reading "Are You 'Triggered' or Just Upset? This popular term is often misused, experts say, which may cause more harm than good" (NYT).

When people use the term trigger instead to refer to everyday things that incite annoyance or offense, they run the risk of conflating traumatic experiences or mental health struggles with everyday challenges, several experts said.... Using triggered to describe negative everyday experiences may also cause people to misinterpret discomfort as danger. They may start to think that bothersome experiences or everyday challenges are harmful, rather than seeing them as opportunities for learning and growth, Dr. Needle said.... 

Sometimes, the word trigger can also be used sarcastically or dismissively, Dr. Needle said — as in, “Oh, you’re just triggered” — to minimize someone’s legitimate negative reaction to a comment or action. “It is basically a way of saying your response is a ‘you problem,’ a sign of weakness or oversensitivity, rather than acknowledging that something genuinely hurtful was said or done,” she said.

I love the name Dr. Needle. She's a clinical psychologist, Rachel Needle.

The headline suggests that the word "upset" is a good substitute for "triggered" when you're not talking about having a flashback to a trauma. But isn't "upset" also pretty dramatic, if we take the dying metaphor seriously? Have you been knocked over, capsized, overturned? 

I've noticed recently that political writers are turning to the word "unsettling." There was the very conspicuous NYT headline: "Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall 'Unsettling' Behavior." 

"GLP-1 drugs may be rewiring circuits involved not only in appetite but in emotion, desire and beyond."

WaPo reports. Gift link. Excerpt:

Tens of millions of people are now taking the medications worldwide, turning what began as an obesity and diabetes treatment into what could be modern medicine’s largest unplanned neuroscience experiments. Scientists are studying GLP-1 drugs — medications that mimic the hormones involved in appetite, blood sugar and digestion — for how they affect not only eating behavior, but also addiction, cognition, neurodegeneration and even motivation and pleasure....

On social media and at doctor’s offices, some users have reported a type of brain fog and others something broader and harder to define: a strange emotional flattening. People describe less pleasure, less motivation, diminished interest in hobbies and even reduced sexual desire. Those accounts are beginning to raise deeper questions about what, exactly, these drugs are changing. If GLP-1s alter the brain systems involved in reward, craving and motivation, researchers wonder, where is the line between quieting a person’s destructive impulses and reshaping personality itself?...

"You can feel it in your chest!"

That was much more affecting than I expected. pic.twitter.com/641gB4OAbU

— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) April 1, 2026

But did he really feel it or was he faking his moongasm?

A viewer demanded I touch the grass behind me to prove it wasn’t CGI on a green screen. pic.twitter.com/XRDJhluMBY

— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) April 2, 2026

"You are skeptical that A.I. can achieve consciousness. Why?"

That's a question asked of Michael Pollan, in "The Interview/Michael Pollan Says Humanity Is About to Undergo a Revolutionary Change" (NYT).

Pollan answers: "I’m convinced by some of the researchers, including Antonio Damasio and Mark Solms, who made a really compelling case that the origin of consciousness is with feelings, not thoughts. Feelings are the language in which the body talks to the brain. We forget that brains exist to keep bodies alive, and the way the body gets the brain’s attention is with feelings. So if you think feelings are at the center of consciousness, it’s very hard to imagine how a machine could rise to that level to have feelings. The other reason I think we’re not close to it is that everything that machines know, the data set on which they’re trained, is information on the internet. They don’t have friction with nature. They don’t have friction with us. Some of the most important things we know are about person-to-person contact, about contact with nature — this friction that really makes us human."

Pollan's new book is "A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness" (commission earned).

"I love the way an audiobook brings me one step closer to a story, removing the middleman of paper or a screen. I’m not just hovering over the action, I’m in it. Channeling it."

Writes Elisabeth Egan, in "Why I Stopped Reading and Embraced Audiobooks/On the joys of having stories in my ears — and yes, listening counts" (NYT).

This is a genuinely new point in what is for me a very old question/"question." (What's the question? Do audiobooks "count"? What does that even mean?) Egan also makes many of the familiar points about audiobooks: You can do other things while listening — chores, crafts, exercise — and it's good for people with vision troubles, great for drifting off to sleep, etc. etc.

But I love this idea that the audiobook is more intimate, bringing you closer to the material. Is that even true?! I think she's saying something about the experience of hearing in contrast to seeing. When seeing, you are looking at a physical object outside of your head. Or so it seems. The words are out there, on the page, your eyes allow you to sense them. But sound feels like it has entered your head, almost like your own thoughts, especially if you're using earphones. And yet both hearing and seeing happen in your brain, through a nerve located deep inside the organ that is part of your head — your optic nerve in the back of your eye or your auditory nerve in your inner ear. 

So the intimacy of hearing as opposed to seeing is a subjective feeling, don't you agree? But then the question becomes whether we prefer this intimacy when reading? I suspect that by using vision to consume a book, you maintain a more sharply critical mind. The page is out there. It's the other. We're suspicious. Or admiring. The audiobook reaches us differently. It's automatically already inside us, stirring us like music, like the murmurings of a loved one.

"Is it ever appropriate to slap someone in the face to calm them down or stop them from spiraling emotionally?"

"I'm thinking of the 'Snap out of it' slap Cher delivers in 'Moonstruck.'"

That's a question I asked Grok after reading "Plane passenger blasted for slapping man amid a panic attack in wild video: ‘You shouldn’t have raised your hand'" (NY Post). 

Here's Cher's memorable slap (or, I should say, slaps):

Don't try that at home and don't try it in public either. Now, you might wonder, what if the man doing the slapping sincerely believed he was helping? (That makes me think of the episode of "Loudermilk" where the main character gives someone the Heimlich maneuver and gets sued.)

Here's Grok's answer, if you are curious. Excerpt: "The 'hysterical slap' is a common cinematic device rooted in early 20th-century ideas about treating emotional distress (once labeled 'hysteria,' now recognized as conditions like panic attacks, anxiety, or dissociation). Physiologically, a slap might theoretically trigger a fight-or-flight response by activating the sympathetic nervous system, increasing alertness through hormone release (like adrenaline) and potentially interrupting a panic loop via surprise. However, this is unreliable and short-lived at best, often depicted in media for dramatic effect rather than accuracy. In practice, it can backfire by provoking aggression, deepening trauma, or shifting the person from emotional distress to physical pain or anger, making de-escalation harder."

ADDED: What are some other ways to deal with emotion that the movies might make you think are a good idea? Grok's answers: 1. Throw a drink in somebody's face to express anger, 2. Kiss someone suddenly to interrupt their verbal argument, 3. Keep pursuing your love object after she/he has turned you down, 4. Grab someone by the shoulders and shake them hard while yelling "Get a grip!" right in their face.

Basically, the movies are full of bad ideas!

IN THE COMMENTS: I'm being savaged for my failure to acknowledge "Airplane!"

Now, I gotta get outta here!

"I know this might come as a shock, because my whole page used to be about loving my flat chest and being confident with it."

"I literally built my entire career around that. Was everything a lie? Was I secretly insecure this whole time, and just using body positivity to make money so I could finally afford a boob job? No."

Said Clara Dao, on TikTok, quoted in "When Beauty Standards and Body Positivity Collide/A new cultural ideal for women is ultrathin and cloaked in the language of inclusivity and self-acceptance" (NYT).

Dao got the implants for “fun,” she explained. After six years and more than 900 videos of “flat-chest content,” she “got bored.”... Dao’s followers are flooding her comments with anger and disappointment, but all the analytics show is that the engagement is through the roof....

I don't understand the choice of the word "but." The "flooding" of comments is engagement. It's a bad use of the human capacity for emotion to get angry at someone like this and to reward her with the attention she sought by doing the thing that made you angry. When will we ever learn?

"Our ethical judgments, he suggests, are governed not by a complex of modules but by one overriding emotion."

"Untold generations of cowering have written fear into our genes, rendering us hypersensitive to threats of harm. 'If you want to know what someone sees as wrong, your best bet is to figure out what they see as harmful,' [writes Kurt Gray, the director of the Deepest Beliefs Lab]. At another point: 'All people share a harm-based moral mind.' At still another: 'Harm is the master key of morality.'..."

Writes Elizabeth Kolbert, in "Does One Emotion Rule All Our Ethical Judgments? When prehistoric predators abounded, the ability to perceive harm helped our ancestors survive. Some researchers wonder whether it fuels our greatest fights today" (The New Yorker).

They say it's the "season to be jolly" and Santa is praised as a "jolly old elf," but I've known a couple people who were jolly...

... and I think people found it annoying and wish they'd settle down.

I presented my musing to Grok and received this distinctly non-jolly response: 

The notion of "jolliness" during the holiday season, particularly around figures like Santa Claus, is indeed a cultural expectation that doesn't always align with personal experiences or preferences.... The idea of being "jolly" during the holiday season is deeply ingrained in many cultures, especially those influenced by Western Christmas traditions.... This image has been perpetuated through various media and commercial representations, setting a somewhat unrealistic standard for holiday cheer.... 

Your experience of knowing people whose jolliness was perceived as annoying might reflect a broader sentiment where excessive cheerfulness can seem forced or out of touch with one's actual mood or the realities others might be facing.

"Along with three quarters of a million other people, I’m a member of r/AmIOverreacting, a forum on Reddit devoted to the problem of potentially freaking out too much...."

"If anything, r/AmIOverreacting is a kind of reactivity buffer zone—a place where reactions can be mediated, and so slowed down. In that sense, it’s part of a larger, society-wide effort.... Mindfulness is another way of managing one’s reactivity. Broadly speaking, mindful minds seek to replace the question “Am I overreacting?” with the neutral observation that, yes, a reaction is happening. In the pre-baby mindfulness workshop I attended, our instructor told us to imagine our emotions as locomotives. 'You can watch the train leave the station without getting on board,' she said. She encouraged us to react to our reactions with nonjudgmental attention...."

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "Are You Overreacting? How to survive when provocations are a natural—and inescapable—part of life" (The New Yorker).

"Even the most apparently conservative and decorous women writers obsessively create fiercely independent characters who seek to destroy all the patriarchal structures..."

"... which both their authors and their authors’ submissive heroines seem to accept as inevitable. The madwoman in literature by women is not merely, as she might be in male literature, an antagonist or foil to the heroine. Rather she is usually in some sense the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage."

From "The Madwoman in the Attic," quoted in "Sandra M. Gilbert, Co-Author of ‘The Madwoman in the Attic,’ Dies at 87/A poet, scholar and literary critic, she turned a feminist lens on 19th-century writers like Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, creating a feminist classic" (NYT).

“People forget that, when they were writing, even to talk about women writers as having anything in common, as having a story of their own, as being connected in any way to each other, was incredibly controversial,” Katha Pollitt, the feminist author, told The Washington Post in 2013. “Now it seems completely obvious.”

Reading poetry out loud "can induce peak emotional responses... that might include goose bumps or chills. "

"It can help you locate an emotion within yourself, which is important to health as a form of emotional processing. Poetry also contains complex, unexpected elements, like when Shakespeare uses god as a verb in Coriolanus: 'This last old man … godded me.' In an fMRI study... such literary surprise was shown to be stimulating to the brain... [Literature] can cause us to recall our most complex experiences and derive meaning from them. A poem or story read aloud is particularly enthralling... because it becomes a live presence in the room, with a more direct and penetrative quality, akin to live music.... Discussing the literature that you read aloud can be particularly valuable.... [D]oing so helps penetrate rigid thinking and can dislodge dysfunctional thought patterns.... [It may] expand[] emotional vocabulary... perhaps even more so than cognitive behavioral therapy...."

Writes Alexandra Moe, in "We’re All Reading Wrong/To access the full benefits of literature, you have to share it out loud" (The Atlantic).

This essay talks about reading out loud to another person and reading aloud when you are alone. There is some discussion of the benefit of listening to another person read to you. You might adopt the practice of taking turns reading aloud with your spouse. There's a brief mention of audiobooks, in the context of saying that you'll remember more of a book if you read it out loud.

"There were no gyms open... and so every day, I swam miles aimlessly in the lake. I'd put on a wet suit..."

"... and I'd jump in the boat dock and I'd swim down, by Johnny Cash's house, and I came back, and I did the same route every single day. Because... I knew that I had to if I wanted to continue this breakout season I was having my sophomore year into my junior year. Right? And the amount of snakes that I swam by and, like, dead catfish that are floating on top of the water that, like, hit you in your face while you're swimming is not pleasant...."

Said Riley Gaines, describing the difficulty of training during the Covid lockdown. That's part of a 2-and-a-half-hour discussion with Joe Rogan, which is mostly about her staunch opposition to allowing transgender women to compete against biologically female athletes. I've listened to the whole thing, and I think Joe is boldly risking his reputation with this material. He's very supportive of Gaines, and the two of them frequently declare that the world has gone crazy:

"The way I experience love seems to be very different from the so-called neurotypical experience."

"My experience of love seems less emotional. If I had to explain what love feels like to me, I would say symbiotic. So, a relationship that’s beneficial to both people involved. Not transactional, not possessive, not ego-driven. Mutual homeostasis. It’s not that I’m unable to access emotions or empathy. It’s that my experience of those emotions is different...."

Says Patric Gagne, author of the memoir "Sociopath," in the interview "What It’s Like to Be a Sociopath" (NYT)(free access link).

"Limerence is a state of overwhelming and unexpected longing for emotional reciprocation from another human, known as a limerent object..."

"... who is often perceived as perfect but unavailable.... The LO is most often a friend, colleague, or stranger met in passing... 'It’s often not romantic or sexual in nature. It is very much about wanting to feel loved and cared for.'... We begin to mistake anxiety for excitement and excitement for joy.... One strategy... to de-idolize their LO is listing reasons the LO is not perfect... [or the] ways in which the LO and the patient are not compatible. Name it to tame it: You can deliberately interrupt the habit by calling it out — 'Hello, limerence' — and paying attention (for example, through journaling) to what it feels like when you’re in that state of longing.... You should also believe you deserve more...."

From "Is It a Crush or Have You Fallen Into Limerence? How an intense longing for a romantic connection can lead to a serious addiction" (NYT).

The article says the word "limerance" was coined by the psychologist Dorothy Tennov, and the OED finds her first use of it in print in 1977. 

That first quote denies any etymology: "I first used the term ‘amorance’ then changed it back to ‘limerence’... It has no roots whatsoever. It looks nice. It works well in French. Take it from me it has no etymology whatsoever."

So if you were seeing a connection to "sublime" or "limn," just forget about it. If you can't forget it, make a list of things that are rootless, nice looking, and well functioning in French.

"Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succes­sion of more or less irritating sounds."

Wrote Vladimir Nabokov, quoted in "Who Doesn’t Like Music? Nabokov, For Starters On the Odd Case of the Musical Anhedonic" (via Metafilter).

The article is by Michel Faber, who says:

Musical anhedonics are thought to account for up to 5 percent of the world’s population....  The syndrome is often discussed in the same articles that pon­der the mysteries of autism.