When the World Feels Too Much: Oscillanguish, Marriage, and the Emotional Weather of Our Time
Saturday, June 20, 2026. Editor's Note: I studied alongside Dr. Afarin Rajaei in graduate school at Antioch of New England. What follows is a collegial reflection on her prescient concept of "oscillanguish" and what it may reveal about marriage, family life, and the emotional weather of our time.
You wake up optimistic about the future.
Artificial intelligence is diagnosing illnesses earlier than ever before.
Scientific breakthroughs are occurring at breathtaking speed. Your granddaughter is considering careers that did not exist twenty years ago.
Humanity, for all its absurdity and stubbornness, remains astonishingly inventive.
By lunchtime, you've read about war, political dysfunction, economic instability, climate disasters, and another round of layoffs.
By dinner, you've encountered conflicting advice about health, alarming headlines about the future, and enough outrage to last several lifetimes.
You no longer know whether to feel hopeful or exhausted.
You settle for both.
Many souls know this feeling intimately.
Recently, my colleague and former classmate, Dr. Afarin Rajaei, offered a name for it: oscillanguish.
The Feeling Between Hope and Overwhelm
Oscillanguish describes the experience of moving between hope and distress, engagement and withdrawal, meaning and uncertainty.
It is not quite despair.
It is not exactly optimism.
It is the emotional whiplash of living in an era where extraordinary possibility and profound instability coexist.
One moment, medicine extends life.
Then next, we wonder whether our healthcare system can sustain itself.
One moment, technology allows us to speak face-to-face with loved ones across vast continents.
Then next, for some, we discover they are unreachable and under threat.
Hope and dread arrive in the same envelope.
What I appreciate about Afarin's formulation is the question beneath it.
Instead of asking:
"What's wrong with me?"
She invites us to ask:
"What am I responding to?"
For marriage and family therapists, this is very familiar terrain.
Marriage and Family Therapists Have Always Known This
Our field has long been suspicious of explanations that stop at the skin.
An anxious teenager may be responding to parental conflict.
A couple's arguments may intensify under financial strain.
A parent's irritability may soften into grief once caregiving burdens are acknowledged.
The identified patient often carries the symptoms of the wider system.
The question shifts from:
"Who is sick?"
to:
"What is this relationship adapting to?"
Oscillanguish extends that question outward.
Perhaps entire societies develop emotional weather patterns.
Perhaps many of us are not malfunctioning at all.
Perhaps we are responding, however imperfectly, to systems that themselves are accelerating and destabilizing at the same time.
Maybe Nothing Is Wrong With You
Many folks enter therapy frightened by their own inconsistency.
"I should be grateful."
"Why can't I stop worrying?"
"I feel excited and terrified at the same time."
"I don't understand why I'm all over the place."
But emotional life has never been tidy.
Parents adore their children and occasionally fantasize about checking into a hotel where no one asks for snacks.
Spouses can deeply love one another while feeling lonely in the marriage.
Adult children may experience both grief and relief after the death of an ailing parent.
Love itself contains contradiction.
Psychological maturity may have less to do with emotional certainty and more to do with emotional capacity—the ability to hold multiple truths without demanding immediate resolution.
Hope and fear.
Joy and sorrow.
Confidence and doubt.
All can coexist and pull on load bearing walls.
Is This Actually New?
Here, I would gently expand the conversation.
Human beings have always lived amid uncertainty.
Imagine coming of age during the Great Depression.
Imagine raising children during World War II.
Imagine living beneath the shadow of nuclear annihilation.
Imagine crossing an ocean knowing you might never again see home.
History has rarely felt stable to those living inside it.
What may distinguish our era is not uncertainty itself.
It may be the velocity.
The news cycle once unfolded over days.
Now it unfolds over minutes. Even seconds.
Our ancestors worried about droughts, harvests, raids, and local conflicts.
We worry about those things too while simultaneously absorbing awareness of distant wars, collapsing markets, viral misinformation, climate projections, and the opinions of strangers we have never met. And for many, these distant wars are not distant at all.
The nervous system evolved to scan horizons.
It did not evolve to monitor the entire planet.
No wonder that we oscillate.
What Oscillanguish Does to Marriage
Large systems inevitably enter intimate ones.
When uncertainty becomes chronic, couples often become less generous with one another.
They become more irritable.
More easily startled.
More likely to interpret neutrality as rejection.
More inclined to seek reassurance that no spouse can honestly provide.
Underneath many relationship conflicts lies an impossible request:
"Promise me that everything will be okay."
Of course, no partner can make that promise.
The stronger promise is smaller.
And more courageous.
"I don't know what will happen."
"But whatever comes, we will face it together."
Security in marriage has never meant certainty about the future.
It has meant confidence in companionship.
The Sacred Work of Ordinary Rituals
If oscillanguish reflects a world that never settles, the antidote may not be optimization.
It may be ritual.
Friday pizza.
Walking the dog.
Morning coffee with your spouse.
Reading aloud to children.
Calling your sister every Sunday.
Saying grace.
Watching the sunset from the porch.
Asking your partner:
"What was the hardest part of your day?"
These small acts accomplish something profound.
They create predictability within unpredictability.
They remind the nervous system that not everything changes all at once.
The world may accelerate.
Tea can still be poured.
Children can still be tucked into bed.
Someone can still say, "Tell me about your day."
Remaining Human
As both a colleague and former classmate, I admire Afarin's effort to give language to an experience many folks already recognize.
Whether oscillanguish becomes part of psychology's enduring vocabulary remains to be seen. I hope it does. I love new words that seem old.
Because the phenomenon she identifies feels authentic, timely, and real.
Many thoughtful souls today are not simply anxious or depressed.
They are trying to remain open to a world of astonishing possibility while absorbing extraordinary levels of contradiction and uncertainty.
That takes energy.
It takes discernment.
It takes courage.
Perhaps the task is not eliminating the oscillation.
Perhaps it is learning how to move within it without losing ourselves.
To stay informed without becoming consumed.
To remain compassionate without becoming flooded.
To tolerate ambiguity without surrendering hope.
To build small islands of steadiness in turbulent seas.
The world has always exceeded our capacity to understand it fully.
Yet ordinary souls continue to perform astonishing acts of faith.
They marry.
They raise children.
They plant tomatoes.
They sit beside hospital beds.
They reconcile with estranged siblings.
They teach first graders.
They make soup for grieving neighbors.
They ask, "How was your day?"
Perhaps oscillanguish is not necessarily evidence that we are failing to adapt.
Perhaps it is what it feels like to remain porous to suffering without surrendering our capacity for hope in times of devastating war and chaos..
The miracle is not that we oscillate.
The miracle is that, despite the oscillation, we continue to love, make meaning, and endure.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Rajaei, A. (2026, April 28). When the world feels too much: Understanding "oscillanguish." Psychology Today.
Bowen, M. (1978). Family therapy in clinical practice. Jason Aronson.
Grant, A. (2021, April 19). There's a name for the blah you're feeling: It's called languishing. The New York Times.
Minuchin, S. (1974). Families and family therapy. Harvard University Press.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.