Word of the Day: "Weltschmerz"

 

Someone  kindly shared this word with me earlier ,"Weltschmerz" -- lit; “world-pain”; the feeling of sadness at the suffering that surrounds you; the despair produced by the ubiquity of distress and  hardship; a weariness at the sheer burden of being.  

Like most great words for elusive emotions, this one is German. It’s a portmanteau of welt (“world”) and schmerz (“pain”), and it describes the displeasure we feel when reality doesn’t live up to our ideals and expectations. It’s also distinct from our other downbeat emotions. Unlike angst, which focuses our dissatisfaction inward, or ennui, which makes us listless, weltschmerz can be as rousing as it is troubling. Not only can the world be better, it should be better.

The phrase has its roots in the 1830s. It was first coined by German writer Jean Paul, who used it to describe Lord Byron’s discontent in the novel Selina, and it signifies a sadness about life. “Weltschmerz is the sense both that one is personally inadequate and that one’s personal inadequacy reflects the inadequacy of the world generally,” says Joachim Whaley, a professor of German history and thought at the University of Cambridge. “It is pain suffered simultaneously both in the world and at the state of the world, with the sense that the two are linked.” 

 As explained by the Encyclopedia Britannica,https://www.britannica.com/art/Weltschmerz the expression sought to define “the prevailing mood of melancholy and pessimism associated with the poets of the Romantic era that arose from their refusal or inability to adjust to those realities of the world that they saw as destructive of their right to subjectivity and personal freedom—a phenomenon thought to typify Romanticism.”  

For 19th-century German writers, weltschmerz was an abnormal sensitivity to the evils and ills of the world and the misery of existence

Another word we could use  is empathy, pain we can carry as humans, while releasing compassion, whilst angry with state of the world, and the suffering of other people, A soul that carries empathy is a soul that has survived enormous pain. Empathy is trying to understand what another person is feeling. It’s actually seeing the world through another’s eyes. 

The other sad things that consume many are greed and apathy. There will never be a shortage of these things. Those devoid of conscience, with no ability to put themselves in another’s shoes. look at our leaders. But we can stop them from spreading by standing up and standing in the way. 

However we can never truly know what pain other people are carrying. They may need compassion more than we realize. The world is very fucked up but the kind of love we see now for collective suffering in Gaza has been truly amazing. All the best hope all have a peaceful day.