Old Feelings
Your feelings are old.
Your world is new.
Meet your emotions with empathy, a small fire companion, and a much longer human story. Old Feelings is an illustrated field guide to what a feeling may be trying to do for you.
Explore the appComing to iPhone. Version 1.0 has been submitted for App Review.
A little understanding
before anything else.
Emotions didn’t begin with inboxes, interviews, or group chats. They belong to a much longer history of staying safe, finding our people, caring for one another, and living with loss.
Old Feelings starts with curiosity about that history. A difficult feeling can become easier to meet when you consider what it might be protecting, asking for, or helping you notice.
That is the motivation for this app: make room for empathy and understanding. Find the word, spend a moment with it, and see it as part of a human story.
A small fire.
A familiar face.
Ember is your fire companion. Expressive eyes, changing faces, and a supportive reflection give each check-in a little warmth.
Choose a feeling, read about it, or save a moment with an optional note. A feeling deserves attention even when there is nothing you need to change right away.
Today’s feeling.
A story thousands of years in the making.
The Guide explores 256 feelings across nine families. Each page considers what a feeling may be for, how it tends to show up, and what it may be protecting, alongside an illustrated fictional scene.
Read a single scene or follow Aren and the Five Fires across 32 chapters. Danger, cooperation, affection, grief, and belonging unfold through the lives of an imagined hunter-gatherer band.
The stories are fiction, with AI-assisted illustrations. The evolutionary framing offers possible interpretations, not settled accounts of how each emotion originated.
Make yourself at home.
These are screens from Old Feelings 1.0. Browse a feeling, follow the story, or return to your own moments.
Empathy and agency have different jobs.
Old Feelings and our other app, What Feels Good, start from different questions. Their main experiences follow those questions.
Old Feelings: understanding
“Why might this feeling make sense?”
Meet Ember, explore a feeling’s meaning, read its illustrated story, and reflect on a personal moment. The heart of the experience is empathy, emotional vocabulary, and companionship.
What Feels Good: agency
“What can I change, and does it help?”
Map everyday experiences by benefit and influence. Choose a practical experiment, record attempts and helpfulness, then keep, adjust, or finish the change.
Explore What Feels GoodBring the whole guide with you.
All illustrations and stories are bundled in the app and available offline. No login is required. New installs keep personal moments on your device, with no advertising or tracking in the app.
Old Feelings is coming to iPhone. While the app is in review, you can read about privacy or get in touch below.