Our everyday vocabulary fails to capture subtle emotions. Some languages developed to fill in these gaps. An example that became popular is Schadenfreude, which means taking pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. It has an opposite in German, Fremdscham, which is the vicarious embarrassment you feel when witnessing someone else’s humiliation. Its Finnish equivalent myötähäpeä is slightly more well known.

I like these words that capture complex feelings. When I was in high school, Wittgenstein made a lasting impression on my very naive mind. He argued that language can only picture facts about the world, and that ethics, aesthetics, and the mystical lie beyond what language can express. I think this is fascinatingly true. I’m convinced that a share of our daily sorrows come from our inability to put them in words. It reassures me when I stumble on a word that expresses a feeling I can’t explain.

John Koenig published The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a collection of invented words for emotions that lack a name. There’s a word in there that resonates with me deeply: anemoia, which is nostalgia for a time you’ve never known.

There are books and movies that make me feel this way. It’s stories where you follow someone’s life over a long period of time. When the story ends, you look back and think “what a life”. For instance, I just finished watching Our Friends in the North, a British TV series that follows the lives of four friends from the 1960s to the 1990s. The characters go through so much, and you see how the world changes around them. When it ends, I feel this deep longing for their era, even though I never lived through it. It’s like I wish I could have experienced that time, with all its struggles and triumphs.

The first time I recall having this sensation was when I read Any Human Heart by William Boyd. The book is written as the diary of a fictional character, Logan Mountstuart, and it spans the entire 20th century. If I recall correctly, there’s a passage towards the end of the book, where Logan is sitting down in Hossegor, and looks around at the youthful crowd that contrasts with his own age. He reflects on the passage of time, and I remember feeling this overwhelming sense of nostalgia for his life, even though it’s not mine and Logan is fictional.

I have a lot of these examples in my mind. Hell, I even remember where I was when I finished watching Prison Break, and feeling this nostalgia for everything the characters went through. It’s a strange feeling, but I think it’s beautiful. It shows how powerful stories can be, and how they can connect us to times and places and people we’ve never experienced. This being said, I know it’s important to stay grounded in the present, and move on and do things. This way I can have nostalgia for my own life when I look back at it one day.