Collective Effervescence
I recently learned the term collective effervescence. Coined by Émile Durkheim in the early 1900s, it describes a state of shared emotional intensity, a feeling of unity that emerges in moments of collective experience, like rituals, celebrations, or movements. Those instances when we feel like part of the same human story.
As I watched Artemis II lift off, I felt a familiar tightening in my chest. The same one that catches when I think about my dad, or when a moment comes back without warning, or when the story of a rescue dog gets me before I can scroll away. Artemis II cut through the fatigue and dread that hum beneath everything lately. Later, I heard astronaut Christina Koch say:
“I just want to describe for you guys the beauty that we’re seeing. You can actually make out the coastline of the continent. You can make out rivers because of the sun glare. You can see high thunderclouds and even from this far, it is just absolutely phenomenal. You guys look great.”
I wondered how others felt when watching the liftoff. Surely it wasn’t just me. I can get swept up in moments like this, when something is so beautiful, so coincidental, it feels too poetic to ignore. That familiar feeling in my chest reminds me that I am human, and I don’t always have to be rational and logical and measured. As it turns out, thousands of people, across countries and languages, felt the same thing, this pause, a quiet, collective bubbling, which I now know has a name: collective effervescence. In addition to having a name, it feels like it has a future.
The world, as it stands, does not make this easy. War is still war, regardless of how it is framed. Children are still dying in Gaza. Violence continues in Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, Haiti, Mexico, the United States, and in places we don’t name as often. On a smaller scale, it finds its way into homes, streets, and daily life. It is relentless and exhausting.
But it is not all of us. Because when we look up, or outward, or beyond ourselves, we remember that we are standing on continents shaped by forces older than politics. From a distance, there are no borders, only patterns. Coastlines. Rivers. Storm systems moving with indifference to everything we fight about below.
We are capable of destruction, but we are also capable of awe, expansive and undeniable. Of standing still, across the world, watching the same launch, feeling the same lift in our chest, and recognizing, if only for a moment, that we belong to something larger.
These moments remind me that we are not finished. If the powerful making decisions could be suspended above all of it, they might understand what is at stake. But they aren’t. So the rest of us will have to remember it for them.