Vorfreude – looking forward to joy
Can you cheer yourself up by focusing on the joy of future fun? Or do you worry, and worry about worry? And do you enjoy worrying? Germans have a nice word for a forward-looking joy, Vorfreude, to describe the feeling of anticipating something you’ll enjoy.
Most of us daydream of holidays and meals and pleasurable events to come, and psychologists even say that is good for us and a helpful practice for lifting your mood, rather than an idle waste of time. So perhaps we’ll soon start talking about a pleasant daydream as a vorfreudian foreshadowing or a key part of the psychological practice of Vorfreudianism, though that almost sounds like a blending of Freudian analytical thought with the mechanistic production approach of Fordism, a term originating from the factories of Henry Ford. Bring on an assembly line for positive thoughts in the unconscious mind! Or could this be a conveyor belt of fears? An American company actually has a UK trademark on the word Vorfreude, for the sole purpose of selling mops! Perhaps customers look forward to mopping up problems…
Vorfreudianism might also, reflecting the meaning of the German prefix vor- meaning before, effectively denote the purer state of psychological understanding before the dark and dirty work of Sigmund Freud, a sort of ur-awareness of unconscious and semi-conscious process – which has been known and explored by poets, writers, painters and contemplatives since the beginning of time, before the concepts of id, ego and superego tried to apply their straitjacket to our own meta-awareness.
When you have a vague state of uneasy worry, English has taken to using the German word Angst for that. So does anyone look forward to worry? Pessimists and grumblers probably do, anticipating all will go wrong and so for them Vorfreude would just be a dangerous double disappointment. Others anticipate anxiety in situations and avoid them or develop ways to cope, so they might look forward to the challenge of engaging with anxiety, or they may be frightened and worried about what may happen in an anxiety-inducing situation which they cannot avoid. Why do people look forward to the thrill of a roller-coaster ride?
Some say when you worry, you suffer twice, while a sage says there are only two kinds of worriers: those who worry too much, and those who worry too little. So perhaps we need a new word, VorAngst, or pre-Angst, to be able to talk about the joys of worrying! Something to look forward to.
