The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

n. the temptation to step off your career track and become a shepherd in the mountains, following your flock between pastures with a sheepdog and a rifle, watching storms at dusk from the doorway of a small cabin, just the kind of hypnotic diversion that allows your thoughts to make a break for it and wander back to their cubicles in the city.

n. a kind of melacholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee—which leads to a dawning awareness of the haunting fragility of life, a mood whose only known cure is the vuvuzela.

n. an expression found in photos of people who have since died—bittersweet, vulnerable, faintly distracted—an illusion that occurs when a one-off snapshot suddenly becomes a glimpse of someone as vivid and alive as they’ll ever be, like the flash of color that sometimes appears just after the sun sets.

n. the age at which you become older than your parents were when you were born, which signals that your leg of the relay race has already begun, having coasted in their slipstream as they tackled the mountain stages of life, leaving you strong, energetic and deeply mortified by their loud yellow jerseys.

n. the imaginary committee of elders that keeps a running log of your mistakes, steadily building their case that you’re secretly a fraud, a coward, a doofus and a douche, and who would’ve successfully revoked your good fortune years ago had they not been hampered by bitter squabblings over grammar and spelling.

n. the habit of closing a browser tab to go do something else, only to absentmindedly return to the website you just left, which is your brain’s way of stress-testing your attention span under a synthetic and highly experimental blend of ones and zeroes, mostly zeroes.

n. the dream versions of things in your life, which appear totally foreign but are still somehow yours—your anteschool, your antefriends, your antehome—all part of a parallel world whose gravitational pull raises your life’s emotional stakes, increasing the chances you’ll end up betting everything you have.