We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion

Many college pal collaborations are successful if they end in the construction of a beer bong or purchase of a couch on Craigslist, but Princeton friends Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris aimed higher when they started crawing blogs and collecting digital footprints including the phrases “I feel” or “I am feeling.” The result? Three years of expressions collected on WeFeelFine.org that create a database of shared human feelings, and, most recently, a hardcover book subtitled “An Almanac of Human Emotion.” An API has been introduced, and with good reason: “Since we are borrowing from the feelings of thousands of people across the world to make our piece, we find it fitting for other artists to be able to borrow from our work to make theirs.”

The duo describe their undertaking as a “contemporary portrait of the world’s emotional landscape [that explores] the ups and downs of everyday life in all its color, chaos, and candor.” Colorful is right: bright hues are used to introduce direct quotes and research, including the observation that both women and men in their 20s say they are happy about 46 percent of the time and that online users’ self-described happiness increases with age). Intimate images are paired with user expressions that are separated by category, including everything from “Election Day” (a photo of a child with glasses under the words “I had never imained how I would feel the first time my daughter voted”) to “Alive” (“I feel so alive yet so alone.”). My favorite section, no doubt, is one with phrases including “feel” and “San Francisco,” if only for its strangeness: “I’m glad I live in San Francisco where I can express myself the way with pants or without.”

A review copy of the book was provided by Scribner. All observations are mine.