With sehnsucht, there is a sense of something that’s on the edge of conscious awareness. It can be like remembering that you’ve forgotten something, but without being able to remember exactly what it is that you have forgotten. Another version of sehnsucht is the feeling that a certain place or object holds within it some potential for a better life, without understanding explicitly how that improvement might take place. The transformation we seek through sehnsucht is in a sense something that’s already in our hands, if only we could realize how to activate it.

This week on Stories of Emotional Granularity, I want to do something a little bit different, but something I’ve been meaning to get to ever since the first season of the podcast last spring. I want to share with you some of the resources I have used to identify some of the many emotions that I’ve listed on my web site and begun to describe here on the podcast.

Let’s celebrate the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett, Tiffany Watt Smith, Tim Lomas, and others who are articulating the many distinct emotions that cultures around the world work with.

We are lucky to find happiness when we can, and the best we can do is appreciate moments of happiness while they last, because just as we do not have to power to compel true happiness to arrive through force of will, we cannot prevent happiness from fading away in time.

Perhaps the secret of happiness is that happiness is not something we can achieve. We can make happiness more probable by setting the groundwork for it to arrive, or we can make happiness less likely to occur, but the most we can hope for is to shift the odds in our favor. No matter what we do, happiness is never guaranteed.

Sometimes, happiness happens to happen, and sometimes it doesn’t happen. The difference is a matter of luck, of happenstance. Perhaps we will be happy. Perhaps we will not.

This episode features reflections on happiness by authors Michael Hofeld, Richard Currier, Michael Connolly, and Ethan Gallogly.