Being me …

tidesofentropy.co.uk Published: 4 February 2026 | Updated: 8 February 2026 6 minutes read

I often experience things that, while human or known, are NEVER, and I mean never described in one human word – and I mean globally, no word will exist in any country or any country’s dictionaries. 🙂

For example. A feeling of relief to return to a grim situation or condition that. itself, hasn’t changed a jot since being experienced prior.

Let me elaborate or explain further using MuseByte as my foil.

I ask …

“What is the name for feeling better, emboldened or inspired after being in a negative / neutral frame of mind but dropping into despair and then greatly appreciating the alleged, apparent negative space far more after a situation of despair has been remedied or overcome?”

That feeling absolutely exists, and it’s not just “relief” or “gratitude,” though those orbit it.

There isn’t one single, perfect English word that nails the whole arc you’re describing, but there are a few concepts that triangulate it very closely. Think of this as a constellation rather than a lone star.

1. Post-Adversity Growth

Often used in psychology, this refers to the positive psychological change that comes after distress or despair, not despite it.

It’s the sense that:

your emotional baseline recalibrates
what once felt flat or negative now feels textured, valuable, even precious
the contrast itself becomes meaningful

This is not mere “coping.” It’s an upgrade of perspective.

2. Contrast Effect (psychological framing)

This is the mechanical underpinning.

A negative or despairing state acts like turning the lights off in a room. When the light returns, the same furniture feels suddenly vivid, generous, even beautiful.

Your “neutral” was never neutral. It just lacked contrast.

3. Earned Optimism

This is more philosophical than clinical, but very apt.

Unlike naive optimism, this kind is:

hard-won
quieter
sturdier
rooted in having been there and come back

It carries a faint hum of confidence rather than cheerfulness.

4. Redemption of the Ordinary

This phrase isn’t a formal diagnostic term, but it’s often used in existential and literary psychology.

It captures exactly what you’re pointing at:

the ordinary world, once dismissed or tolerated
becomes redeemed after despair
not because it changed, but because you did

5. Existential Recalibration

This one fits your description uncannily well.

After despair is resolved, there’s a reset of:

value
scale
importance
emotional weighting

The previously “negative space” becomes not just acceptable but affirming.

If you wanted a single coined phrase that behaves properly:

Contrast-affirmed vitality

Post-despair appreciation

Neither is canonical, but both describe the lived phenomenon cleanly without flattening it.

What this is not

Not toxic positivity
Not denial
Not simple relief
Not mood swing

It’s a deepened relationship with reality, forged by having briefly lost it.

And quietly, this is one of the ways humans grow without becoming brittle.

If you want, I can also map this onto philosophical lineages (Stoic, existentialist, or even thermodynamic metaphors), but I’ll stop here and let this land.

No. But feel free to record the prior and following. Be advised; intriguingly, specially as I’d nearly framed the question as “What is the name OR PHRASE”, it appears that my own “salt on the tongue” platitude, often used to describe the act of one experience or event becoming a benchmark or datum point through which to ‘taste’ or contrast some adjacent benchmark, is as elegant an answer.Updated saved memory

Understood. And agreed.

“Salt on the tongue” does the job with rare economy. It carries sensation, contrast, memory, and calibration all at once, without dragging in theory or sentiment. The datum is bodily, immediate, and unmistakable. Once tasted, everything adjacent is re-read through it.

What matters most is that it isn’t explanatory. It’s experiential. You don’t define the mechanism; you mark the threshold. That’s why it survives contact with real life better than most clinical labels.

Recorded.

My salt reference is actually coincidental to my main, pressing question though. So we don’t have a single word, but lots of sentiments, platitudes and proverbs, (Grass being greener on the other side?) to describe or label ‘gratitude’ in discovering that a status quo point, when lost, is no longer such a status quo point when regained.

Yes. You’ve put your finger on the crux of it, and you’re right to separate the salt from the search.

There is no single, clean English word that names this precisely. That absence is telling. What we have instead is a ring of sayings, moralised proverbs, and soft-focus sentiments that gesture toward it without quite landing the experience itself.

Let me pin it down carefully.

What you are describing is:

not gratitude in the Hallmark sense
not simple relief
not envy reversed
not “the grass is greener” (that’s about misjudgment before loss, not revaluation after recovery)

It is specifically:

The reclassification of the familiar after temporary loss.

Or more plainly:

The moment when the regained ordinary is no longer ordinary.

English does this badly in single words.

So we lean on proverbs and moral fables instead.

A few that orbit it, imperfectly:

You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone
Useful, but scolding and retrospective.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder
Too romantic, too narrow, but structurally close.
Grass is greener on the other side
As you note, almost the inverse case. It warns about fantasy, not calibration.
Counting your blessings
Moral bookkeeping. Misses the visceral shift you’re describing.
Familiarity breeds contempt
Diagnoses the problem, not the cure.

What’s missing is a word that captures status quo re-enchantment.

Other languages get closer, but still not perfectly:

German circles it with Wiedergewinn plus modifiers.
Japanese gestures toward it with mono no aware, but that leans toward impermanence rather than recovery.
Latin had restitutio, but stripped of feeling.

Which leaves us where you already arrived, honestly:

The phenomenon is real, common, and foundational to human meaning…
but linguistically under-described.

So we invent phrases, metaphors, and benchmarks.

Your “salt on the tongue” works because it: