Humans feel and think. We are social animals — we need to express ourselves, we need to be understood, and we need to understand what's happening inside us.
Sometimes words help us understand what we're feeling. The act of naming an emotion — with precision, not just a broad category — actually changes the emotional experience. You can't work with something you can't name.
This collection goes through the major emotional territories: the science of how emotions are constructed, the psychology of happiness (which turns out to be much stranger than we assume), the anatomy of love across its different forms, the difficult emotions and what they're for, the bittersweet world of melancholy and longing, and the consuming forces of desire, attachment, and revenge.
The references draw from neuroscience (Lisa Feldman Barrett), psychology (Brené Brown, Daniel Gilbert, Robert Plutchik), philosophy (Buddhism, Stoicism, the Greeks), and literature — because some emotional truths are best understood through story.