Have you ever felt velvetmist? It’s a complex and subtle emotion, eliciting feelings of comfort, serenity, and a gentle sense of floating. Peaceful, yet more ephemeral and intangible than contentment. Perhaps the sight of a sunset, or a moody, low-key album might evoke it. If you haven’t ever felt this sensation – or even heard of it – that’s not surprising. Velvetmist is a neo-emotion, a feeling recently brought into existence.

A Reddit user named noahjeadie generated it with ChatGPT, along with advice on how to evoke the feeling. With the right essential oils and soundtrack, apparently, you too can feel like a soft, fuzzy, draping ghost floating through a lavender suburb. While it might sound like a whimsical AI experiment, velvetmist is part of a larger trend. Researchers say more and more terms for these neo-emotions are showing up online, describing new dimensions and aspects of feeling. Velvetmist was even a key example in a journal article about the phenomenon published in July 2025. But most neo-emotions aren’t the inventions of emo artificial intelligences. Humans come up with them, and they’re part of a big change in the way researchers are thinking about feelings, one that emphasizes how people continuously spin out new ones in response to a changing world.

The creation of new emotions, whether by humans or AI, speaks to the dynamic nature of our inner lives. For decades, the prevailing view in psychology was that humans possess a limited set of basic emotions – happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. These were considered universal, hardwired into our brains. However, this perspective is evolving. Now, many researchers believe that emotions are more fluid and culturally influenced than previously thought. We don’t just experience pre-defined feelings; we actively construct them based on our experiences, beliefs, and the language we use.

This is where the invention of new emotions comes in. As our world changes, so do our experiences. The rise of social media, the climate crisis, and rapid technological advancements are all creating new situations and challenges that existing emotional labels may not fully capture. So, we invent new ones.

Consider the feeling of "digital overwhelm," a sense of anxiety and exhaustion caused by the constant stream of information and notifications in the digital age. Or "eco-anxiety," the worry and distress related to environmental degradation. These are relatively new emotions, born out of specific contemporary circumstances. They provide a more nuanced understanding of our experiences and allow us to better articulate our inner states.

The role of AI in this process is particularly interesting. Large language models like ChatGPT are trained on vast amounts of text data, which includes countless expressions of human emotion. This allows them to identify patterns and relationships between words and feelings, and even to generate novel emotional concepts. While AI-generated emotions like velvetmist may seem artificial, they can still resonate with humans and provide new ways of understanding our own emotional landscape.

"AI can act as a mirror, reflecting back to us the complexities of our own emotional lives," says Dr. Anya Sharma, a cognitive scientist specializing in AI and emotional expression. "By generating new emotional concepts, AI can help us to see our feelings in a new light and to expand our emotional vocabulary."

The implications of this trend are far-reaching. If emotions are indeed fluid and culturally constructed, then we have the power to shape our own emotional experiences. By consciously inventing and cultivating new emotions, we can potentially enhance our well-being and resilience. For example, if we can learn to feel "hopepunk" – a sense of defiant optimism in the face of adversity – we may be better equipped to cope with the challenges of the modern world.

Of course, there are also potential risks. The invention of new emotions could lead to emotional inflation, where we become overly focused on labeling and categorizing our feelings, rather than simply experiencing them. It could also create a sense of emotional elitism, where certain emotions are seen as more sophisticated or desirable than others.

Ultimately, the invention of new emotions is a testament to the human capacity for creativity and adaptation. It reflects our ongoing efforts to make sense of our ever-changing world and to find new ways of connecting with ourselves and others. Whether these emotions are born from human experience or generated by artificial intelligence, they offer a glimpse into the future of feeling. As we continue to navigate the complexities of the 21st century, the ability to invent and cultivate new emotions may be more important than ever.