👉 Alright settle in, class. Let’s tackle a wee little bit of linguistic weirdness today - we're dissecting a word that frankly shouldn’t exist, but somehow does. Prepare yourselves for...
theless.
Now, thelessness isn't just the absence of something. It's… messier than that. Historically (and here I stress, historically! We barely even know who started using this first), it describes the feeling of being utterly, profoundly, and frankly bore-rottingly unfulfilled. You see a thing – a job, a relationship, your entire damn existence— and you realize there’s just… nothing to fill that space. Not with anything good, anyway. Think of a beige wall that hasn't seen a lick of paint since the Carter administration. That exact kind of numb disappointment. It's not sadness. Sadness implies a point from which you might hopefully recover. Thelessness is more like being permanently submerged in lukewarm dishwater. You just… are, and it’s actively awful. There isn't a great way to describe the feeling with pretty words. We were initially joking about this back in early 2018 in a small corner of the internet—it was essentially a response to overblown, performative misery on social media. Now, apparently, it’s kinda… stuck? It bounces around between ironic usage and genuine expressions of that beige-
