Friluftsliv

Friluftsliv is a Norwegian word for the feeling of rightness we get when we’re able to escape the architecture of civilized life. It’s an emotion associated with an expansive, unconstructed experience of time and space.

Natural spaces are not always easy to come by. They’re under threat from the activities associated with human civilization. That same human civilization, as much as it protects us, can make us feel emotionally drained. Talking about friluftsliv is a way for us to talk about the feeling of the lack of balance inherent in civilization, and the importance of addressing threats like pollution and climate change.

In this episode, the first of the Stories of Emotional Granularity podcast, Lior Locher, Audrey Holocher, Pinelopi Margeti, and Jaime McNeil each provide their perspectives on what it means to feel friluftsliv.

Full Transcript:

Welcome to Stories of Emotional Granularity, a new podcast about emotion. My name is Jonathan Cook. I’m an independent researcher who studies emotion. I’ll let you know a little bit more about me as this podcast develops, but for right now I want to get straight into what this podcast is about.

Let’s skip the theme music, the advertisements, the casual banter, and talk about emotion.

You may be wondering why emotion matters, in particular, enough to make a podcast about it.

The answer is that emotions are the last stronghold of our humanity.

Emotions matter because it’s emotions that tell us what matters. Emotions are stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world that we live in.

Beyond the facts of the world outside us, beyond the words and gestures we use to connect with others, emotion is something that belongs to us alone. We can try to share it, but at its foundation, emotion is a private thing.

Emotion is the foundation of our subjective experience. It’s the one part of us that no one else can measure, and no one else can claim.

Some people, however, don’t want it to stay that way.

We live in a time when some people are using the power of digital technology to try to break through the walls of the stronghold of emotion.

They want us to believe that our emotions are just another commodity that can be scanned with machines, replicated by algorithms, and claimed as corporate property. They have invented chatbots that claim to feel emotion, and automated visual scanners that they say can read the emotions in our minds just by looking at our faces.

Does that sound right to you?

I want to see a future in which human emotion flourishes, in which a new level of emotional self-awareness gives us the insight required not just to survive, but to thrive as one part of a healthy living world where everybody has access to the resources they need to pursue lives of meaning.

We have seen enough from Silicon Valley to know that its venture capitalists can’t be trusted as stewards of our emotions. So, we can’t wait and hope for someone to launch a startup with a new app that will protect and manage our emotions for us.

If we want to defend the integrity of our human emotions, the first step is to become more familiar with them. We need to know what we seek to protect. That is the task of this podcast, Stories of Emotional Granularity.

Emotional Granularity is a term that was coined by the psychologist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett to describe the ability of people to identify and distinguish between different subjective feelings. A person with high emotional granularity is capable of naming and explaining many different emotions. A person with low emotional granularity can only identify a small number of emotions.

Emotional granularity is all about naming our feelings and learning to articulate those feelings to others so that we can construct a culture that supports a diversity of emotional experiences. The more emotions we know how to feel and to manage, the more strategies and tactics we have at our disposal for managing the complexities of life.

We will explore the details of emotional granularity more in the weeks to come. Each episode of this podcast will be devoted to one emotion, explored from different perspectives with the help of guests who share stories about the role of that emotion in their lives. 

This week, we begin with the emotion of friluftsliv.

Friluftsliv

Friluftsliv is a Norwegian word for the feeling of rightness we get when we’re able to escape the architecture of civilized life. Friluftsliv literally means “free air life”, but as an emotion, it involves much more than that.

Lior Locher

One perspective on the emotion of friluftsliv comes from Lior Locher. Lior and I first met in the Portuguese capital city of Lisbon, where we worked together to organize a session on gender in business in a park called the Garden of the Stars.

“I'm Lior Locher. I'm an artist and I work in mixed media. What that means is usually either acrylic or collage or printmaking, and very often two or three out of the three. What I love about that is it helps to make a journey visible because you can see the different steps. It involves ripping things up and starting again, which I think is pretty much what life does as well. But then, at the end of the process, you have something that says something that honors that journey and that makes it beautiful. I think that's a great way to make that visible. So that's why I'm working in that way.”

Just this week, Lior sent me one of their works of art, a collage with the title “The World II”. It’s a multilayered production, with a map at its base, a mass transit ticket, some foliage, part of a QR code, and what feels like a blue block print of the opening to a ruined cathedral. It’s got a very urban historical feel to it, and there is plenty of history around Lior these days, as they are living in a city on the coast of England.

“I'm non-binary, I live in the UK at the moment. I've been around the world a few times, so I've lived in six countries on four continents, but home for the moment is here. I work with people and organizations that aren’t just in it for themselves, but that want to make a difference.”

Lior didn’t grow up in England, but on the European continent, in the south of Germany. That’s where they first experienced the feeling of friluftsliv, although they didn’t have that name for the emotion at the time.

“The Heidi image is not completely off the mark. I grew up in the in the foothills of the Alps, so it isn't quite Heidi and the Sound of Music. It's kind of the hills that come before the big mountains happen. It was really, really rural. I mean, we didn't have street names, so the houses in the village were ordered numbered in the order they were built, like that rural, and not even school busses to the nearest high school, that's how remote it was.

Yeah, and there wasn't really anywhere to go except the outdoors. I had very strict parents, so TV and so on wasn't really a thing. Plus, you know, back then there were like three programs without a satellite dish, so there wasn't really much happening anyways now. So, it was pretty much a free-range childhood. You'd come home from school. You'd do homework, and then you'd go outside and you have to be back by the time it got dark. That was it, and they didn't really ask too much where we were going or what we were doing or what we were up to.

So, it was my brother and me and two other kids in the village that were of a similar age bracket. We were just outside the whole time, basically. It was kind of, it felt really, really connected, to the point where it felt less natural for me to be inside and, for example, to wear shoes. So, I kept getting  into trouble at school in summer because I refused to wear shoes, because I didn't really see the point, and it just felt better to be barefoot outside.”

Lior’s experience as a young child suggests an important context for friluftsliv. It’s an emotion that is felt in reaction to the feeling of containment in organized society. Is there a name for that specific emotion of feeling trapped by the structures of civilization? If any listeners know of such a word, get in touch and let me know.

Lior got into trouble at school, and was forced to wear shoes, but at home, they lived what they refer to as a “free-range childhood”. The implication is that formal social expectations can make a person feel penned in, like a chicken or a cow, prevented from roaming by a fence on a farm where they will eventually be harvested.

When school was over and homework was done, however, Lior and the other kids their age escaped outside, where they ran barefoot, feeling connected to the world.

“I just have the fondest memories of being outside, I remember it's kind of hills and grassland, so there is a lot of agriculture, but it's more dairy. So, a lot of it would be just grass with cows on it and occasional apple orchards and so on. Being outdoors meant climbing trees, which I got really good at as a kid, definitely.

I don't have fear of heights, so that always felt really great and I loved just kind of hanging out, climbing halfway up and hanging out on a branch and just being there, sometimes reading a book or just kind of hanging out in the tree with the tree. That always felt really comfortable, and very often, because on the pastures, you would kind of grow the grass to a certain height and then they would cut it down and they would do that multiple times a year, so there were definitely times when the grass was fairly high, maybe it was knee high, but, you know, for a kid who is kind of a pretty good size and the farmers obviously didn't want us to run around in the high grass and kind of trample it down because then you can't cut it properly and you kind of lose the food for the cows, but yeah, I remember there was this this one hill where that was kind of my go to my go to place and particularly in spring before they did the first cut of the grass.

I remember just making these little dens. I would have this tiny, I would kind of walk in really carefully, so you couldn't really see that a human had walked in, and then just kind of roll like a cat. I was kind of rolled up in the middle, and I was small enough or the grass was high enough that you couldn't really see me unless maybe you could have a different angle, but in my imagination, you couldn't see me. I spent like entire afternoons there, just kind of being there, playing with the grass, looking at the world from that vantage point, thinking thoughts.”

It strikes me, listening to Lior’s description of their times as a child outside in the foothills of the Alps, that they were re-enacting a truly ancient free-ranging kind of life. Like our ape ancestors, Lior felt a special kind of comfort climbing a tree and resting in its branches. Also like our ancestors, they came down from the trees from time to time, to find a different kind of shelter in the tall grass. 

“I remember I was making these elaborate kind of crowns of grass, and I made them in a way that there was still like bits of grass sticking up, and in my imagination, that made me completely invisible. And that's what I did, sometimes with flowers, sometimes without. Sometimes I tried to make baskets out of grass, which didn't quite work, but I kept trying anyway, and that was just how I spent a significant portion of my childhood.

Outdoor shelter is about connection and houses are about separation. So, when you're outside and you're underneath a tree, when it rains, you're kind of protected, but in a way that's still a part of everything else, and when you have a house, nature doesn't have right angles, so if you have a traditional house, it's like you're deliberately leaving everything outside, and, you know, the ideal is the temperature is always the same, the humidity is always the same and so on. Everything's flat and angular and wipeable and kind of, like I can clean my kitchen sink. You can disinfect it and everything.”

There’s something in friluftsliv as Lior describes it that finds special pleasure playing at the boundary between wilderness and civilization. They make a basket, but one that falls apart. They find shelter outdoors in a tree, but an open kind of shelter that has no walls.

Civilization has undeniable benefits, but there’s something in it, Lior explains, that drains us. To get recharged, we have to spend time outdoors.

“It's kind of like you feel it kind of is a nice homeostasis when I'm outside enough and it doesn't have to be the same landscape, it just has to be whatever landscape is where I am. So it doesn't have to be, you know, the southern Germany, temperate climate kind of a landscape. But for me, it's almost like I'm getting withdrawal symptoms or it's like I'm losing energy or like the colors are draining out of me or, you know, whatever metaphor you want to use. It's like the outdoors is kind of my docking station, so I need to be there and kind of recharge, and I've done that.

So last week, I've been kind of traveling around a bit in the north of the U.K. and I've mostly been city-based, and then yesterday, after a long day of team sessions, I went outside. There is kind of a nice landscape with rolling hills, and so on fairly close to where I live. So, I went up there and I walked around for two hours, and I just stood there and I just needed to kind of stand there and let it all come in and out.

It's almost like when you have like a membrane and the pressure is different on both sides and it just needs to be there for a while until it kind of levels out. I think I need to do that regularly. Otherwise, I'm not feeling well if I don't do that. How I can see that is if I spend a lot of time in nature and it's really nice and beautiful, and sort of wild enough or beautiful enough and like happy nature, not like the stress sort of nature, and it's like my breathing changes and it changes in a way I can't sort of try and do myself. I have to wait until it happens.”

Lior talks about friluftsliv as an achievement of homeostasis, a rebalancing of pressures that accumulate during time in the city. This realignment of pressures reaches the right levels out in nature. It’s not something that has to be managed, because nature is by definition a place that takes care of itself, without the interference of planning committees and maintenance crews.

“Every cell of my body is breathing, and is kind of communing with nature in that way, and it usually takes a while to start, but then that's just really wonderful.

I think it has something to do with homecoming. It also feels like, almost like an umbilical cord without it being a cord to something specific, but the same kind of exchange and the same kind of you need that to get some essential nutrients that you can't make yourself. It is something about, being held and being welcome and being put back together, so kind of rest and healing and all of that. Yeah, and I'm trying to extrapolate from the word, because it's not German, but it's closely related enough. So how I'm in my head trying to make sense of the word is that the love of fresh air? So, there is love, definitely. It's also not just fresh air. It's really the outdoors, so you couldn’t replicate that with an oxygen cylinder.”

 Lior’s final observation about the linguistics of friluftsliv is important. Friluftsliv is a Norwegian word, and Lior is not Norwegian. They are German, so friluftsliv is a foreign word to them, but close enough to some German to almost have it make sense.

The English language is not quite as close to Norwegian as German, perhaps. Nonetheless, when the emotional concept of friluftsliv is identified to English speakers, it feels familiar.

Audrey Holocher

That’s how it was for Audrey Holocher.

Audrey is a certified Medical Support Clinical Hypnotherapist. She specializes in stress reduction, relaxation, and natural pain management. She is also a Neuro Linguistic Programming Master Practitioner and a Certified Narrative Consultant. Her education and professional experience include an M.S. in Environmental Sciences & Engineering, a B.S. in Food Science & Technology. Audrey has decades of experience in market research focusing on physician, patient, and caregiver journeys across multiple disease states.

I have known Audrey for something like twenty years. We have worked together many times, traveling to different cities. Cities are where the people are, and so, that’s where the work is.

There’s another side to Audrey, though, one that I haven’t had the privilege to witness in person. Audrey flourishes when she’s given time to be outside. Like Lior, Audrey told me a story about when she was a child.

“This is grade school, very, very young, eight to ten, and we were surrounded by woods in our childhood home. So, I can see the woods and the ravine. We were free-range kids. You know, we were watched over, but we all played in the woods. It wasn't like today with the worry of, where is your child? All the mothers on the neighborhood rang a big bell and yelled. You could hear them calling you home, but so, that ranging around in the ravine in the summers.

I don't remember winter. I don't remember any of that. I just remember being in the ravine and I remember this log. I used to go on with a little friend or by myself, and we'd walk across this log and it seemed so high up and dangerous. And I remember that it probably wasn't it was over the creek. But I really remember this little green tree frog that we would see, a tiny, tiny little green tree frog and just being in the woods and the evergreens. And we had a fort made out of rotting, rotting tree trunk bark. So, it was red. It must have been cedar, but it was just powder, you know. So, I remember playing with that powdery and being amazed that that tree trunk would turn into powder, you know, so just playing in the woods and being in the woods, and seeing that little tree frog.

Then, just the other day here, it just kind of mapped across because I was not in the woods yet, but just in my backyard. And I, okay, I lifted up a little tray that I have to catch some water under the faucet and there's a tiny little frog. It wasn't bright green, but it was just as big as your thumb, just tiny, tiny. And I haven't seen one of those tiny little frogs since I was a kid. I think that's what kind of brought it all together when we came here. I went in the woods for the first time, which we didn't even know we had all these trails around us and went in the woods and I'm walking through the woods. I just felt like I was home. I just had all the auditory memories of the kinds of birds I grew up with are here as well. And it just really struck me how I just feel so connected in the woods to nature and something larger.

You know, the childhood is grounding and all that, but it's just that it's just that, like a snap. It just I know this is the outdoors are where I belong and that's where I feel most at peace. That's my, that's what supports me spiritually. That's my connection to spirit. So, for me, being in the woods is very deep experience, and I just really enjoy. It doesn't really matter, doesn't have to be a specific wood or specific forest or it's just I mean, they're so stately. We're surrounded by these ponderosa pines and they're huge, you know, like all the trees were in childhood, you know. But it's just I feel very connected looking at them.

I'm not a poet, but lines will come into my head that I write down, you know, that helped me feel very connected to something larger. I reread it once in a while, and it's like, where did that come from? So, it does it's something it's something I'm part of, but also something so much larger than myself. I just feel like then nature outdoors embodies that. That spirit and that strength, and it just feels very right to me, I have to be outside. I like to be outside at least some part of the day, and I really feel it when I’m not.”

Audrey and Lior grew up on different continents, speaking different languages, but in trying to describe their experience of friluftsliv, they both used the same term, “free-range”, to describe the special feeling of what they were allowed to experience as children. This shared experience across vast expanses of geography and differences in language suggest something that’s connected to some primal aspects of what it is to be human. Audrey had the freedom to go out ranging in woods that contain very different species of plants and animals from what Lior knew as a child, because Audrey grew up in the Northwest corner of the United States, where she returned to live just a few years ago.

Of course, the last few years haven’t been quite the same as what we’re used to. They certainly weren’t “free-range”. During the Covid-19 pandemic, we couldn’t always travel freely from city to city, or even from building to building. Yet, the outdoors never shut down.

“It's been so much easier now with the lack of travel, you know, just being able to be out in the woods and feel so calm and centered and at peace. They’re very healing. I often feel like it's like balm to me, you know. It's like an emotional balm. It's very, very right, that that's why I love that phrase of the rightness that comes from spending outdoors in nature. That's my spiritual connection.

I'll be walking in the woods and sit down under a tree. And, I don't know, I just, I feel very connected in it and at peace with when things in the world get crazy and chaotic. I just feel like it's the trees are so grounding. Nature's very grounding. I feel like all is well there.”

 What Audrey mentions here about trees is very important. Remember how Lior felt climbing up trees and being held in their branches. Audrey is referring to a different part of the feeling of being close to trees. She calls them grounding. Feeling grounded is another emotion, related to friluftsliv, but one that we’ll have to get to later.

For now, let’s listen to more about the feeling that Audrey gets being among the trees. There’s a specific emotional benefit she gets from tree time that’s very interesting to me.

“That feeling inside, that connecting is with nature and the cosmos and that being connected, there's something larger out there, you know, not just us running around with our day to day activities and things like that. There's a higher purpose, and I think nature, just being out in nature reminds me of that. I know from being inside, my home is a refuge. I love my home, and I value it very much and I appreciate it very much, but it is just four walls at the end of the day. I've been in homes that I've loved and left. I've had to leave them, you know, and your house is, after all, just a structure. You know, it's got to be inside. I've got to be okay. I've got to, I've got to know to be okay and be right in the world. This is all taken from me or, you know, one day I don't have a home. So, I think it's that inner that I feel from the trees and the nature, that's what's going to stay, not these structures.”

Audrey taps into a very ancient piece of wisdom in her comparison of trees and houses. She describes a different sense of relationship with houses, which she values, yet seem more temporary than the trees growing outside. Audrey acknowledges that she may lose her house. She may be forced to move from one home to another. Such structures are temporary. Trees, however, are what’s going to stay, even when the houses we know today are gone.

Trees endure. This isn’t an isolated observation Audrey makes. There’s a linguistic connection between trees and endurance that goes back thousands of years, to the theoretically reconstructed language of Proto-IndoEuropean. The word “tree” and the word “endure” are both derived from the ancient root word “deru”, which is thought to have referred to things that are able to withstand destructive over time. A tree does not simply have the quality of endurance. A tree is an embodiment of the principle of endurance. Other emotionally important words also come from this same ancient idea, but we will have to get to those in a later episode.

Pinelopi Margeti

Of course, there’s more to the outside world than just trees. I was reminded of that when I spoke to Pinelopi Margeti. Pinelopi is a former colleague I met when I was working in Chicago. At the time, she was managing research projects for corporate clients who were seeking to understand the nuances of consumer motivation. Pinelopi is now in Miami, working for a leadership consulting firm.

The common factor in all of Pinelopi’s work is her attention to the underlying cultural subtleties that must inform business practices in the global economy.

“My thesis at Duke was about combining consumer psychology with this other major that was called visual media, and I wanted to show how consumer and consumer psychology can influence advertising and how the different cultures and also cross-cultural psychology plays a really big role in that and how your culture changes your consumer psychology and all that and how advertisers change across cultures.”

 Pinelopi came by her passion for cross-cultural work as a result of personal experiences early in her life, when her family immigrated to the United States from an island in Greece. Even as she moved from place to place, the joy in being outside has remained a constant in her life. However, that joy became more difficult to access when she moved to downtown Chicago. 

“I have been always such a huge, huge nature person. I grew up in Greece and on an island. I was on the beach all the time, sand under my feet, and then when I wasn't, I was always out in the forest that was near my grandparents' house. And then, when we moved to Miami, we had a backyard, and I've always been barefoot, always been barefoot because I love walking barefoot outside. Then when I moved to Chicago, I now live downtown and I struggle to even find parks with grass areas. So, I've been feeling kind of, the opposite of this in a way, as I'm missing nature a lot. I feel a little bit out of place when I don't see a lot of green or a lot of trees or a lot of grass to step on.

Then my parents visited me a couple of weeks ago, and they brought our dog. So with our dog, I was looking for parks to take him, and I found this beautiful, gigantic park that I hadn't been at before and we were playing frisbee, and I took my shoes off because I didn't have good shoes to run on the grass, and I just felt like right at home, and I just kept my shoes off the entire time and I was just walking on the grass and just felt so good. I feel so grounded when I'm in nature under trees, and I don't know, for some reason, just being barefoot on grass makes me feel like I'm in the right place.”

Pinelopi reminds us that the joy we feel in being outside isn’t something that we experience alone. Pinelopi struggled to find natural spaces in Chicago until her family came to visit. It was her family’s dog who led the way back outdoors, showing Pinelopi where green space was to be found. We as human beings are not alone in the world, and that’s one of the sources of the pleasure we feel as friluftsliv. We live in this world along with other beings. Our dogs, the grass, and the trees are our companions when we step outside.

Most of the natural world, of course, has no dogs, no grass, and no trees. We forget this, but most of the surface of our planet is covered with water. Pinelopi, as a small child growing up on an island, feels a special connection to the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, and she still does.

“It's probably my favorite place in the world, it's just the bluest water, clearest water. You can see shadows of the fish that are swimming. It's that clear. So, just like standing where the waves meet the sand and just standing and looking at the blue water that's surrounded by like the green behind it is just, it's one of the places where I feel the closest to nature. It's just water, trees, blue sky, and you kind of forget that cities and, I don't know, concrete jungles exist.”

Jaimes McNeal

Of course, Pinelopi doesn’t live on that Greek island any more. Most of us cannot live in the countryside. There is little economic opportunity for us there, and there are now too many human beings on the planet for us all to live as hunters or farmers.

How can we cope with this estrangement from nature? How can we feel friluftsliv when we are unable to abandon our homes and the civilized lives that sustain us?

One response to this challenge came from the industrial and organizational psychologist Jaime McNeil. Jaime specializes in identifying beliefs and behaviors that inhibit desired outcomes, then leading his clients in articulating effective strategies for overcoming those obstacles. He’s currently teaching at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology.

“I am Jaimes, Jaime McNeil. I'm 54, black and gay. I'm married. I'm a scholar. I'm a lifelong learner and really, my purpose is to teach.”

I began doing research work with Jaime during the pandemic. Our work at the time, however, was exclusively remote. I live in the northeast, but for a long while, Jaime has lived and worked on the West Coast. In his time there, Jaime has witnessed some of the destruction of the natural world outdoors that’s come with the accelerating climate crisis.

“I worked in Northern California. I traveled about 80 percent of the time and the fires in Sonoma were really, really bad. I had never actually experienced that, but we were 60, 70, 80 miles away and you had to wear a mask because it smelled of burning asphalt and burning rubber, which is a horrible smell.”

In spite of the fires and droughts and atmospheric rivers afflicting California, Jaime remains committed taking time to get outside.

“The breeze, the sun, just motion. Sitting at this desk as many hours as I do. It hurts after a while, and I don't care how expensive this chair it's a great a chair, but sitting down and stuffing your body in this shape like this is not comfortable.”

For Jaime, the chair represents the uncomfortable relationship many of us have with civilization. Getting out of his chair and choosing to get outside is an essential part of his effort to remain healthy.

Jaime’s approach to getting outside is an active one. His friluftsliv isn’t just an emotion. It’s a practice, like the practice of meditation. It’s something that we work at in order to attain its benefits.

Simply getting outside isn’t enough for Jaime. Instead of passively soaking up the sensations of being in a natural environment, Jaime spoke to me of the benefits of walking outdoors.

“This month, for instance, I walked one hundred and fifty miles. That was my goal from my watch, and years ago I discovered that I loved walking and I discovered it in San Francisco. Taking on the terrain of San Francisco is really daunting, and it was a way for me to process being away from home. It was to keep me, keep my mind busy.

A friend of mine would often join me and we just walked everywhere and I fell in love with San Francisco on my feet and I didn't, I wouldn't have thought that San Francisco was kind of a nature place, because it really is the western New York.

So really, I just got outside and discovered that San Francisco is actually very much about nature, that nature and civilization, industrial solutions sort of coexisting.

I love bridges, and getting going over the Golden Gate Bridge to the Marine Headland and just walking. So, I wouldn't have ever thought of myself as somebody who is an outdoor, who comes alive outdoors, but I do. I think it probably has to do with just sort of living in my head. So much of my life is in my head, and so it's a way to get to experience my body. I used to run. I was a runner, I did marathons and I still run, and every time when I'm in my best shape is when I'm running. But, I actually discovered that what I can do for long periods of time without interruption, without risk of injury or hating it, is walk. I can walk. Sometimes we walk twenty-two miles in a day, get up five o'clock morning, walk across the Bridge to Sausalito, turn around and have breakfast, come back.”

Jaime’s love of bridges is a wonderful representation of his own way of experiencing friluftsliv. His practice of long walks outside within the city of San Francisco bridges the apparent divide between constructed and natural spaces. Jaime has learned to see that nature is not something that only exists outside of cities and civilization. We can perceive nature coexisting in places along with the industrial world, if we cultivate the right mindset.

There may be purists who insist that the only proper way to experience friluftsliv is to travel out to a truly wild place, completely free of human impact. The truth, of course, is that there is no place left on Earth that is completely free of human impact. Even at the bottom of the deepest parts of the oceans, we find trash and the scars left from trawling.

Besides, emotion is felt from the inside out. Its validity comes from our own experience of it, not from compliance with external rules.

None of the people we heard from today come from Norway. Yet, the Norwegian emotion of friluftsliv is familiar to them. The word is a foreign import, but the concept isn’t.

Friluftsliv is something that people feel, and have a strong connection to, but we don’t have a word for this emotion in the English language. This deficit isn’t due to a small vocabulary. The English language has many more words in it than most other languages. The fact that even English lacks a word for friluftsliv suggests a broader trend, that people tend to feel more emotions than they have language to describe.

There are opportunities for cross-cultural learning of emotion concepts that can enrich our lives. When we gain the word friluftsliv, we gain the ability to talk about an emotion we have already experienced, although we didn’t know how to identify it. To describe the feeling, we must use a large number of words to get to the idea. When we bring those ideas into the word friluftsliv, we begin to share our passion for being outside in natural spaces more easily.

Natural spaces are not always easy to come by. They’re under threat from the activities associated with human civilization. That same human civilization, as much as it protects us, can make us feel emotionally drained. Talking about friluftsliv is a way for us to talk about the feeling of the lack of balance inherent in civilization, and the importance of addressing threats like pollution and climate change.

Emotions are internal experiences that tell us when something is worth paying attention to. When we expand our emotional vocabulary, we don’t just get better at crossword puzzles. We gain new conceptual tools for dealing with the challenges of our complex world.  

The work of expanding our emotional granularity has just begun. In next week’s episode, we will explore another emotion that may feel foreign to many Americans, even though it originated within the borders of the United States. We will consider the emotion of compersion.

Until then, thanks for listening in.