New feelings for a new age

Doom scrolling

Spending hours and hours on your phone taking in as much information about the coronavirus as possible. This often continues late into the night, making you feel sick and anxious.

Carnucha

The feeling of becoming confused because you’ve mixed too many different sources in your head, and while you’re arguing passionately you’re also sliding down a slippery slope and it’s dawning on you, even as you continue to talk, that you haven’t thought this through properly, you might be regurgitating someone else’s argument, and you are, in fact, wrong.

Culture trip

Someone saying something to you that you haven’t heard before, like referring to a cute small dog as “smol”. This prompts you to correct them because that’s not a real word, only to have them explain to you that “smol” is a “thing now”. This causes you to trip over your own age and wonder if it was like this when you were young.

Miley Cyrus

Cockney rhyming slang for the coronavirus. Not technically a feeling, but too good not to include. You’re welcome. Used like this: “Have you had the Miley yet?”

Infodemic

The feeling that your normally resilient immunity to mendacity is being compromised by the globally spreading virus of fake news and faulty information. You think you’re an old hand at telling the difference between Trump-style whoppers and what’s actually going on in the world, but the growing prevalence of information and opinions blazing through your various WhatsApp groups is making you wonder whether your internal bullshit detector is dialled up to the max. You think you’re not the hooeyswallowing, Kool-Aid-drinking type, but you’ve started trawling Reddit into the wee hours of the morning and may have, after all, caught the infodemic.

FNB

Not the bank. The blowout. First Night Blowout. The massive surge of excitement that happens when you have been separated from your friends for a while, or you have just arrived on holiday, and all the excitement bubbles up and you drink too much tequila and end up at 3am sending your ex some “tasteful” nudes. Fail. This captures both the heightened excitement and the steep precipice to despair and regret, which arrive pretty much the moment you open your eyes the next day. Expect a pandemic of FNBs when we’re allowed to go to restaurants, clubs and social gatherings again.

Photosympathis

Seeing someone else’s well-curated life, whether it is their social media avatar or their, let’s face it, grown-up apartment and taking it all in like sunlight and turning it into self-pity. You can’t help it, you synthesized their achievements into a measure against which you find yourself lacking. You feel searing selfpity for the scale of your inadequacies.

Fattening the Curve

A by-product of having been inside for a few months. All this indoor time has resulted in the slow but steady expansion into our once roomy tracksuit pants. This is followed by a sister emotion, “jeanfright”. This occurs when you attempt to put on your skinny jeans for the first time only to realise that you are far too fat for them.

Covidiot

The person who causes feelings of exasperation because they are either not taking Covid-19 seriously enough, or are taking it too seriously. Covidiots are lurking everywhere, failing at social distancing while also complaining about people walking in the park.

Pregret

A building sense of foreboding about something that is about to happen. The sense of a foregone conclusion that causes you to pause, knowing that what you are currently doing is going to cause regret. One can endlessly pregret a break-up, living with the loss of a partner while still actively dating them. Similarly, Tuesday night afterwork drinks can kick off with a deep pang of pregret, because you KNOW before you’ve even slid onto the bar stool that you will be doing yourself in for the week.

Cliterati

A gathering of women as a sisterhood in a space for self-reflection and rest, free of judgment. But also, the joy of being surrounded by girlfriends. At any moment you expect Girls Just Wanna Have Fun to play and for all car trips to be in topless Jeeps where you can sing with your arms in the air. Also, there may be glitter. But, it’s, like, deep and serious as well. Coming soon to a Zoom Room near you.

Competionship

Recognising excellence in your friend and being struck with the sense of how much you admire them, but also how much you want to beat them at their goodness. Their excellence inspires you to be greater yourself and in competing with them your companionship is made stronger. Occurs most often between sports teammates or work colleagues.

Performance hangxiety

When you are so hungry that you are reading the menu and you want to order a pizza with sushi and macaroni cheese but you know you don’t want all of that, but you do want something desperately. This can render you unable to perform the act of ordering, all the while desperate for your hunger to be satiated.

Contrabrand

A smoker’s preferred type of dodgy cigarette under the lockdown banning. As in, “Stephen usually smokes Camel but Sharp is his contrabrand”.