Introduction

We are going through tumultuous and unpredictable times. In roughly a decade, modern societies have faced a series of large-scale and unprecedented crises, the aftermath of which they have still not fully recovered. If the great recession of 2008 brought a long period of austerity, inequality, and diminishing opportunities, the exceptional situation generated by the COVID-19 pandemic not only exposed the unhealed social and psychological wounds of the previous crisis, —especially amongst the most vulnerable segments of society— but unleashed a worldwide cascade of human losses, workplace changes, and mental health problems whose long-term consequences are yet to be determined. Amid this challenging and uncertain scenario, the war on Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and Palestine have triggered a new humanitarian and financial crisis of likewise severe and unforeseeable outcomes. Climate change, migration, youth unemployment, work precarity, and fake news on social media also add to a long list of challenges contributing to the turmoil of the present’s fast-shifting social and political landscape. While in 2021, the expression “the new normal” meant bringing back part of the familiarity and routine of pre-pandemic years, in the dawn of 2023, such an expression has acquired a different meaning: an emerging era of predictable unpredictability.

Indeed, as philosophers and social scientists of liquid modernity have rightly noted, the present moment is characterized by a prevailing condition of high volatility (Bauman, 2007; Han, 2020). No wonder nautical metaphors have come in handy to describe this uncertain and erratic situation: politicians calling upon institutions “to row together;” extraordinary fiscal and legal measures to help businesses and workers “stay afloat;” citizens blaming their governments for being stuck in a “sea of contradictions” in taking essential decisions; social commentators noting that “we are all in the same storm but not on the same boat” to emphasize the unequal distribution of suffering; official reports comparing the world economy with a vast ship “going adrift;” or the continuous appeals to individual responsibility to successfully “navigate uncharted waters” are just some examples of this. In such a volatile cultural and socioeconomic context, stability has become a sign of privilege, a luxury within reach of the very few. For the remaining majority, not having firm ground beneath their feet entails great emotional distress and seriously limits their capacity to plan and build secure life projects.

In this uncertain and unpredictable scenario, many would unquestionably benefit from solid psychological guidelines that help them manage and tolerate their ambiguous and unstable situations. However, the problem goes beyond lacking proper skills and strategies for coping and adaptation. Instead, difficulties lie in the unsettling feeling of being permanently lost associated with their unstructured, unstable, and unpredictable life contexts, thus not knowing what to adapt to, what to expect, and how to go on. In other words, the problem for an increasing number of people is that they feel disoriented.

Building on previous work that has approached the concept from a variety of different philosophical perspectives (di Friedberg, 2018; Harbin, 2016; Ratcliffe, 2021; Velasco, 2021; Velasco et al., 2023), the article argues that disorientation is a valuable construct for gaining insight into how challenging social and cultural situations and contexts affect people emotionally. First, section two provides a literature review on disorientation, illustrating the multidisciplinary and polyhedral nature of the concept. Section three outlines an approach to disorientation as an emotional experience. This section provides a working definition of the concept, drawing mainly from an interactionist perspective, and characterizes disorientation as a situated object of study. I share Harbin’s (2016) observation here that “getting as clear as possible what disorientations are and what specific disorientations do requires understanding disorientations from as many angles as possible” (Harbin, 2016: xv), so bringing interactionism to analyzing the topic can help in this direction. Sections four and five present and comment on examples of traumatic and ordinary social and cultural contexts that, from this perspective, may elicit disorienting experiences. Section six returns to what has been set out in the introduction section and comments on the relationship between disorientation and culture. Finally, the article concludes with a few remarks on the research value of disorientation as an emotional experience.

A Multidisciplinary Concept

The prototypical definition of disorientation has been commonly related to its spatial meaning. From this perspective, people are physically disoriented when they have lost the coordinates to properly read their spatial location in the surroundings and the possibilities within it. Consequently, the physical environment is perceived as unstructured, and individuals feel confused, anxious, and helpless. In this regard, much of the research on the topic has been developed by geographers, spatial theorists, and cognitive scientists. This literature has focused on issues such as wayfinding in explorers, travelers, sailors, or hunters (Ingold, 2000); consumption- and crowd-control-oriented designs in malls and theme parks (Woodward et al., 2000); collective and individual behavior in evacuation situations (Koo et al., 2014); or users experience in web navigation and virtual settings (Smith & Marsh, 2004). Important in this line of research is the pioneering work of Velasco and colleagues (Velasco & Casati, 2020, 2021), who study the cognitive mechanisms that underlie disorientation, defining the construct as “a metacognitive feeling of low confidence in the subject’s online system of spatial representation” (Velasco & Casati, 2020: 12). Whereas these authors have focused on the analysis of the sense of disorientation in different spatial environments, they have more recently extended their analyses to study the perception of time and social environments (Velasco & Casati, 2021).

The concept’s interest, indeed, has not been limited to its spatial form. On the contrary, non-spatial forms of disorientation have also been used by multiple disciplines to describe a wide range of cultural, social, and clinical phenomena. From a clinical perspective, for instance, psychologists and psychiatrists have addressed disorientation as a complex psychophysiological symptom underlying severe mental and physical problems such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), agoraphobia, chronic pain, Alzheimer’s, or dementia (Yardley, 1997), and has been related to grieving processes(Mehmel, 2021) and suicidal thoughts (Lester, 1995), amongst others. This clinical approach has emphasized the relationship between the physical and mental symptoms of disorientation (e.g., loss of control, self-doubt, fatigue, anxiety, stress, uncertainty) and the importance of traumatic events as triggers of disorienting states. In this line, authors such as Yardley (1997) have defined disorientation as an unsettling state of doubt about the relationship between the self and the environment, resulting in an incapacity to act appropriately. For its part, authors such as Mehmel (2021) have conceptualized disorientation as a negative experience of futurity, defining the concept as a sense of meaningless and foreclosed future.

With a focus on phenomenology, philosophers and social scientists have tackled disorientation to describe a wide variety of social and individual experiences (Harbin, 2016; Ratcliffe, 2021), including our modern relationship with nature and ecologism (del Castillo, 2019), the uses of oscillation in sex and death rituals (Moscoso, 2021), the experience of illness (Lajoie, 2019) and disability (Parrey, 2016), or the shock of migration and exile (Ahmed, 2012). From this perspective, the experience of getting lost in a physical sense has commonly served as a basis for existential, epistemological, and socio-cultural accounts of disorientation, generally marked by feelings of pointlessness, anxiety, vulnerability, unfamiliarity, and confusion —but also motivation and curiosity. Tuan (1999), for example, identified disorientation as a deep state of paralysis in which there is no reason to move one way rather than the other, a state in which “life, with no sense of direction, is drained of purpose” (Tuan, 1999: 93). From a different perspective, Harbin (2016) favors a family resemblance definition of disorientation to characterize a heterogeneous set of experiences, typically spurred by major life shifts, that all share something in common: a persistent sense of having lost one’s footing and being adrift, making it difficult to know how to go on. Solnit (2005) has also associated disorientation with the feeling of getting lost in two different senses: the experience of the familiar falling apart and the experience of the unfamiliar appearing.

In a more optimistic tone, Harbin and Solnit also noted that whereas feeling lost might be a terrible sensation, it might alternatively be a source of new expectations and motivation for exploration and discovery. Relatedly, Earnshaw (2019) defines the concept as a “feeling of losing one’s coordinates for action” (Earnshaw, 2019: 179), thus leaving us inarticulate and at a loss of how to go on. Like Solnit, Earnshaw suggests that disorientation, often shocking and devastating, might also motivate constructive action, especially for intellectual inquiry, where it would be essential to instill epistemic virtues in the inquirer (e.g., love for the mysterious and unknown).

Finally, disorientation has also been described as a feeling of strangeness with one’s life. In a way, when disoriented, one might feel like a stranger in his own skin. In this regard, the metaphor of “the stranger,” that is, the outsider trying to integrate into a foreign culture, has been used by phenomenologists like Schutz (1944) to define what it feels like to be socially disoriented. Relatedly, authors like Ratcliffe have interestingly defined disorientation as a type of what he calls “existential feeling,” that is, a way of finding oneself in the world, that is inseparable from the body (Ratcliffe, 2020), that challenges one’s sense of reality (e.g., things feeling surreal, uncanny, or strangely unfamiliar), and which “is not experienced as contingent and escapable” (Ratcliffe, 2021: 463) but as a background orientation to apprehend the relationship between the self and the world.

Disorientation is a broad and transversal theme that speaks to many problems, areas, and disciplines. The versatility of the concept implies both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, this versatility makes disorientation a powerful metaphor for the contemporary era, able to express the multiple difficulties people have in finding reliable points of reference in today’s uncertain and unpredictable world (di Friedberg, 2018). On the other hand, the many-sided nature of disorientation makes it a hard concept to confine, partly explaining why there is no unified understanding of the phenomenon (Martin & Rosello, 2016; Velasco, 2021). In this regard, outstanding attempts to provide a comprehensive framework for the concept from philosophy, geography, and cognitive science can be found in the works of Harbin (2016), di Friedberg (2018), and Fernandez Velasco et al. (2021), respectively.

However, although the concept has been a multidisciplinary research object, the focus on disorientation from the perspective of emotions has acquired particular interest more recently, especially after the rising global concerns with mental health following the breakdown of the COVID-19 crisis (Means & Slater, 2021; Velasco et al., 2021). Still, studies in this line of research remain scarce. To expand the current investigation on the topic, the paper aims at a first approach to conceptualizing disorientation as an emotional experience from an interactionist perspective.

Before continuing, it is worth underlining that, as the literature review suggests, while disorientation has been addressed from a variety of theoretical frameworks, no attempt has yet been made to address the construct from an interactionist perspective. The present paper represents a first, yet introductory effort in this regard. Indeed, a full and comprehensive analysis of this issue would pose at least two major challenges: first, to fully demonstrate what interactionism brings to the conceptualization of disorientation, and second, to show how interactionism handles the concept better than other competing approaches. A sufficient and complete analysis of both aspects is, however, far beyond the scope of this introductory paper. Although certain points along these lines will be made, the aim here is not to pit interactionism against competing frameworks, but rather to highlight what interactionism might add to advance the multidisciplinary understanding of the conceptFootnote 1. As such, the paper is intended less as a finished analysis than as an invitation to philosophers and social scientists in general, and interactionists in particular, to take up the analysis of disorientation by arguing about the enormous potential of the concept to advance our understanding of the situated and socio-cultural nature of emotional phenomena.

Disorientation as an Emotional Experience

Symbolic interactionism (a.k.a. interactionism) is a major theoretical perspective in social sciences (Hall, 2007). First developed by Blumer (1969) in the ’60s and influenced by the works of pragmatists like Dewey and Mead (Harris, 2000), the phenomenological perspective of authors like Heidegger, Gadamer, and Schutz (Elpidorou, 2013; Rehman, 2018) and the oeuvre of dramaturgists such as Goffman or Burke (Turner, 2007), interactionism emphasizes co-joint and evolving processes of structure and agency; rejects dualistic and reductionist thinking; underlines the role of cultural dynamics, social identities, and moral norms in shaping individuals’ meanings and feelings; and prioritizes contextual and situated analyses in the account of human experience. Following these theoretical tenets, interactionism has been applied to the study of a myriad of philosophical and sociological concerns, including power, identity, consumption, inequality, collective behavior, and environmental experience (Cabanas, 2019; Hall, 1997; Plummer, 2000).

The study of emotions is also central for interactionists. Although there is no single, consensual definition, interactionism broadly addresses emotions as relational rather than intrapsychic phenomena, intentional rather than accidental, and sociocultural rather than neurological. Accordingly, emotions should be widely regarded as meaning-making processes that emerge in person-event significant transactions involving diverse and imperfect related phenomena such as bodily changes, individual goals, personal identities, social roles, shared expectations and references, and cultural norms and values (Leys, 2017; Shott, 1979; Snow, 2001). Following such a viewpoint of emotions, interactionism detaches itself from reductionist perspectives that allocate the understanding of emotions to a particular realm, be it neurological, biological, psychological, sociological, or cultural. It also detaches itself from mechanistic perspectives that address the analysis of emotions as a sort of causal chain of stimuli-response (e.g., Tooby & Cosmides, 2008); evolutionist perspectives that define emotions as a phylogenetically-rooted core set of unconscious and automatic behaviors (e.g., Ekman, 1992); and post-humanist approaches (e.g., affect theory) that understand emotions as non-conceptual, non-linguistic and non-intentional processes —hence downplaying the role of human agency in the conceptualization of emotions (e.g., Massumi, 2002). Finally, while interactionist and phenomenological approaches to emotions overlap in their rejection of positivism, their emphasis on agency, intentionality, and appraisals for understanding the emotional, and their defense of the key role that emotions play in the always dynamic exchange between self and environment (for an extensive analysis in this regard see, for example, Elpidorou, 2013), these approaches differ —beyond methodological divergences— in that, unlike phenomenology, interactionism remains skeptical of the assumption of a pre-reflexive affective attunement to the environment underlying the emergence of emotional experiences, does not conceptually separate feelings from emotions, and emphasizes the functional nature of the emotional, focusing instead on how emotions emerge as ongoing events that confirm or disconfirm usual meanings of self, situation, and both (Campos et al., 1994).

From an interactionist perspective, treating disorientation as an emotional experience involves conceiving of the construct as a complex and functional feeling that arises when certain events disrupt usual meanings of self and environment, with the feeling persisting or diminishing as disruptions persist or are resolved. Understanding what conditions are potentially disorienting, how individuals appraise these situations as disorienting, and what the major psychological factors and consequences of disorientation is the major task of interactionism. On this basis, interactionism can add to previous phenomenological and geographical studies a deeper understanding of the social dimension of disorientation, examining the extent to which uncertain norms, unintelligible social settings, and unstable cultural environments produce more or less deep and persistent feelings of strangeness to oneself, unfamiliarity with one’s surroundings, and an anxious inability to find one’s way and successfully navigate certain situations.

Given their unfamiliarity, ambiguity, or unintelligibility, interactionists consider that certain cultural environments, social contexts, and life events are potentially more disorienting than others. This is so because these situations involve significant doubt and uncertainty about how individuals should adapt, navigate, and make sense of them. Individuals in such cases tend to feel that their “thinking and behaving as usual” becomes unworkable, so they perceive the situation as out of control, doubt their prior knowledge, and remain acutely uncertain about how to go on and what to expect. Consequently, they may experience a broad range of discomforting feelings, ranging from anxiety, fear, and estrangement to powerlessness, vulnerability, and apathy. In this sense, I might define disorientation as a distressful feeling characterized by a more or less sustained sense of loss of control, unfamiliarity, and uncertainty about oneself (how do I go on) and one’s future (what to expect), generally triggered by a disruptive or challenging event or environment in which individual’s “thinking and behaving as usual” turns unworkable to read, adapt, and navigate the situation.

Although the term disorientation is rarely used in everyday language, the experience of being disoriented is much more frequent (di Friedberg, 2018; Harbin, 2016). Related terms like “confused,” “messed up,” “stuck,” “awkward,” “disconcerted,” “overwhelmed,” or “puzzled” are more commonly used in everyday language. Still, none of these feelings fully capture the emotional experience of being disoriented and its implications. They are neither feelings that tend to persist over time, nor do they disrupt or challenge the self (e.g., identity or sense of purpose) as significantly as disorientation does. The features of temporality and significance that define the emotional experience of disorientation resonate with Ratcliffe’s (2008, 2020) notion of “existential feeling,” which is especially interesting here. Drawing on phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger’s discussion on “mood” or “attunement,” Ratcliffe characterizes an “existential feeling” as a background, significant, general and non-localized “sense of how one finds oneself in the world as a whole” (Ratcliffe, 2020: 251; italics in the original). Feelings of being “separate and in limitation,” “not being at home,” “disconnected from the world,” or “trapped and weighed down” would be examples of existential feelings put forward by Ratcliffe. Although the author does not specifically address disorientation, the family resemblance of disorientation to these feelings and Ratcliffe’s emphasis on their significance and persistence over time make the notion of “existential feeling” particularly helpful for discussing the kind of emotional experience addressed here by disorientation. However, while I agree that significance and temporal persistence are important features of disorientation, my approach differs from Ratcliffe’s in that disorientation is not conceived a priori as a general, background, non-localized, and pre-reflexive attunement to the world, but would emerge as a significant experience only a posteriori, that is, in the ongoing person-situation transaction. Also, from an interactionist perspective, what would count as sustained and significant is more relative to the person-situation transaction than the concept of “existential feeling” suggests. In this respect, the paper leans more toward Harbin’s proposal, which treats both temporality and significance in disorientation as more contingent features. About temporality, Harbin (2016) says that:

All the disorientations I discuss are sustained in the sense that they are not just passing, momentary flashes of unease quickly followed by a return to feeling fine. Beyond that, the meaning of “sustained” varies. Unlike some classifications of experiences, such as those used in clinical contexts, there is not a minimum time requirement (e.g., six months) that must be met in order for something to count as disorientation, nor a maximum time allowed (e.g., two years) before the experience becomes recognized as a more severe condition. What counts as “sustained” might be indexed to the particular context of disorientation. Disorientations brought about by having some kind of marginalized identity in an oppressive social world (e.g., by being non-white in a racist social context or queer in a context of heteronormativity) may last longer than disorientations brought about by a diagnosis of a curable illness, but both count as sustained, relative to their context. (Harbin, 2016: 18; italics added)

Beyond related terminology, it may well be that some expressions such as “to have lost one’s way,” “to be at a crossroads,” “to go through a rough patch,” “to stand on shifting sands,” or simply “to need guidance” better capture the emotional experience of being disoriented (i.e., distress, loss of control, uncertainty). However, it should not be taken for granted that certain terms or expressions uniquely describe or denote experiences of disorientation. Returning to Harbin (2016), being disoriented does not require individuals to describe their experience as disorienting or to use a particular word or phrase. This is because some people may not come up with an accurate or close term to describe their experience; because people may choose not to describe themselves as disoriented given the pejorative connotation of disorientation; or because people may feel disoriented at a given moment but only label their experience as disorienting in retrospect. Again, the situation is key. Thus, to determine whether or not someone is disoriented from an interactionist perspective, it is necessary to examine what people say and do in the context of their lives. This involves analyzing what situations or events are potential elicitors of disorienting experiences and how individuals develop, narrate, and make sense of their experiences in these contexts.

Whereas providing examples of such analyses is beyond the introductory scope and limits of this paper —and thus a matter of future inquiry—, the article next focuses on the former, commenting on prototypical events that, given their socio-cultural features and psychological impact, might be deemed as potentially disorienting. The paper first follows Harbin’s (2016) work in considering traumatic events as prototypical potential elicitors of disorienting experiences. Subsequently, and in addition to Harbin’s focus on traumatic situations as potentially disorienting, this paper presents and further argues that potentially disorienting events are not limited to traumatic ones but are abundant in everyday social situations and contexts. Indeed, the paper contends that disorientation, far from being rare or exceptional, may be a much more common emotional experience than is commonly thought.

Disorientation after Trauma

Traumatic events are paradigmatic instances of potentially disorienting events. These include natural disasters, war conflicts, terrorist attacks, the loss of a child, severe illnesses, and sexual assaults, to mention a few. Because traumatic events involve a dramatic loss of habits, a significant challenge to identity and self-perception, and a sudden break in many of the landmarks that people normally use to orient themselves in their everyday lives, people are particularly prone to feeling disoriented in these highly disruptive situations. Suddenly, former priorities become pointless, taken-for-granted surroundings turn unfamiliar, and habitual patterns of thought and behavior are questioned. Such highly disruptive events tend to trigger intense feelings of anxiety, self-doubt, uncertainty, sadness, and vulnerability and usually hinder coping and decision-making, thus making it harsh for individuals to navigate the situation and know how to go on.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a good and recent instance of a highly traumatic, disruptive, and hence potentially disorienting event: As Luca de Picione and colleagues (2021) have pointed out, the pandemic “fostered a generalized phenomenon of loss of orientation; absolute search for reassurance; and search for restoration of socio-cultural meta-organizers, in the attempt to re-orient one’s life (de Picione et al., 2021: 104). In this respect, it is not surprising that the exceptional situation of the pandemic has been analyzed through the lens of disorientation by numerous commentators interested in the associated psychological effects and the suspension of social, economic, and cultural order. For example, Velasco and colleagues (2023) were interested in the extent to which the pandemic disrupted the cognitive processes that people normally rely on to orient themselves spatially, as well as socially and temporally, focusing on the different types of temporal disorientation that people experienced during the outbreak. Others, such as Means and Slater (2021), were more interested in the systemic disruptions caused by the pandemic, linking the experience of disorientation to the collapse of neoliberal ideals, the widening of inequalities and economic insecurity, the inadequacy of policy responses to the situation, or the growing awareness of the fragility of our ecological systems during the outbreak, all of which led to a dramatic change in social life and collective expectations. Ratcliffe (2021), for his part, linked the disorienting experience of the pandemic to a crisis of reliance on others, suggesting that a significant loss of trust and hence the ability to rely on others for guidance was what made the pandemic a deeply disorienting experience.

Ratcliffe’s point is particularly relevant here because it underscores a key aspect of interactionism: social relations. The COVID-19 pandemic drastically altered typical modes of interaction, communication, and community life, causing widespread disorientation. It disrupted not only individuals’ trust in each other and the system but also their daily routines, social roles, and identities. Indeed, the pandemic quickly rendered the social and symbolic world uncanny, with lockdowns and social distancing making once familiar rituals and symbols strange and unclear: Activities such as handshakes, hugs, and gatherings became anxiety-provoking; remote work disrupted camaraderie and collaboration among colleagues, challenging professional identities and leading to disengagement and questioning of preferences; restrictions on public spaces deprived individuals of shared rituals, fostering isolation and unreality; the flood of misinformation and conflicting narratives created confusion and doubt, complicating decisions about health and safety, and so on. In short, in a matter of days, people around the world faced disrupted life plans and profound uncertainty about what to believe, what goals to pursue, what actions to prioritize, and how to behave to navigate the exceptional situation.

Migration is another example of how shocking and disruptive experiences can be highly disorienting (Ahmed, 2012). The loss of familiar surroundings, the need to integrate into and make sense of new environments and ways of life, the questioning of own identity and taken-for-granted values, or the threat of being treated as an unwelcome outsider by the recipient community are all common challenges for people leaving their home countries temporarily or permanently (Harbin, 2016). From the point of view of the migrant, the peculiar norms, culture, and frames of reference of the recipient group are hardly accessible, and the usual schemes of interpretation and expression cease to provide trustful guidelines to navigate and disentangle situations. Finding the way in the new community feels like embarking on a journey without a readable map and a reliable compass. Whereas for migrants moving to a new place voluntarily such disorienting experiences might be exciting, for those escaping poverty, violence, or forced to leave for any other reasons, migration is largely painful. In these cases, disorientation is more frequently accompanied by fear, shame, powerlessness, and a recurrent sense of being lost and not feeling at home than by awe, wonder, or curiosity. Irregular migrants are an instance of this, for whom disorientation comprises not only affective and spatial but also ontological components (Farrier, 2016).

Relatedly, another example of forced migration and its relation to disorientation and trauma can be found in the ongoing war conflict in Ukraine and the resulting unprecedented humanitarian crisis. In this regard, disorientation is a valuable concept to describe the emotional state and severe psychological impact that terror and forced exile have on millions of Ukrainian refugees. Olga, a 20-year-old medical student in Ukraine who temporarily made it to a shelter in Poland, is just one of the millions of stories that account for the disorienting effects that such traumatic situations effect on people’s mental health: “So far, I have not found a way to stay calm. I feel scared all the time. People like me need mental health support because we feel completely disoriented and lost. My mother is the same —she cries, checks the news on her phone, and has no idea what will happen next” (WHO, 2022).

Illness and disability are also good examples of exceptional and traumatic situations that can be deeply disorienting (Harbin, 2016; Lajoie, 2019; Parrey, 2016). Physical and mental health conditions tend to disrupt one’s sense of self, body, and place in the world, bring social stigma to people who suffer from them, and lead to feelings of being out of place, not belonging to one’s body, or not fitting in and connecting with others. These experiences can also lead to disaffection, vulnerability, and meaninglessness as individuals struggle to find meaning and navigate a world that is not always accommodating or understanding of their needs. Lajoie (2019), for example, highlights this point. Similar to other experiences such as racism, queerness, or migration, the author notes that mental illness can be deeply disorienting because people who suffer from it struggle with normative definitions of normalcy and constantly live in a liminal situation where the ambiguous status and constant negotiations with oneself and others about one’s role, capacities, and limitations are mixed with feelings of discomfort, anxiety, and deep doubt about how to behave and relate to others.

However, important from an interactionist perspective is the fact that while most traumatic situations are disorienting for most people, not every traumatic situation is disorienting for everyone. Furthermore, despite its disruptive and challenging nature, not every disorienting experience is inherently negative because, depending on the person and the situation, disorientation can increase self-awareness, empathy, and understanding for others going through similar situations, or it can rearrange one’s priorities, leading to more functional and adaptive changes (Harbin, 2016; Parrey, 2016; Lajoie, 2019). Indeed, people react differently to adversity. Research in the field of Trauma Studies and psycho-oncology, for instance, has accounted for these differences in coping and sense-making processes in the aftermath of severe illnesses (Linley & Joseph, 2004). Depending on the disease severity, the time elapsed since diagnosis, socioeconomic level, gender, age, or cultural background, some people are likely to appraise the event from a constructive and “positive” lens and hence experience higher benefits than distress (a phenomenon known as “posttraumatic growth”) (Tomich & Helgeson, 2004). However, this is not the norm. Studies in this line of research are also consistent in finding that positive appraisals following highly disruptive events are exceptional, difficult to generalize, not always positive, and themselves variable over time (Carver et al., 2009), with feelings of confusion, depression, and a deep sense of being lost dominating experiences after trauma.

To date, the literature on disorientation has focused primarily on traumatic events. I agree that these extraordinary circumstances are crucial to understanding the emotional experience of disorientation. I argue here, however, that beyond traumatic situations, disorientation should be regarded not only as an exceptional but also as an ordinary emotional experience that emerges —in similar form and intensityFootnote 2— from the cultural, social, and interpersonal contexts of everyday life. Indeed, I suggest that its everyday character is one of the features that make disorientation a fascinating and generalizable object of study for gaining insight into what, why, and how everyday situations and contemporary cultural and social challenges affect people emotionally —individually and collectively.

Disorientation in Everyday Life

Numerous everyday events in life can make people feel disoriented. Non-exceptional but nonetheless significant happenings such as the loss of a relative, having the first child, being laid off from a job or starting a new one, falling in love or going through a sentimental break-up, getting retired, or simply becoming aware of aging are but a few instances of life moments in which individuals might feel at a loss about what to do, what to expect, and how to go on as they lack the coordinates and any previous experience to read and navigate the situation. Consider, for instance, the transition to university life as a potentially disorienting event that many young people experience every year. Such a transition, albeit common, has a significant impact on young people’s identity formation, academic engagement, and mental health, for whom the enormous gap between school and university entails important changes and challenges. As Ding and Curtis (2021) point out, feeling “lost,” “alone,” and “messy” is a common experience for many youngsters who struggle with adaptation to the new cultural setting of the university.

As with traumatic happenings, some ordinary events in life are potentially more disorienting than others, engaging individuals in ambiguous, unprecedented, or undefined interactions with them. This is particularly the case with new and unfamiliar events (e.g., having the first child, moving to another country), destabilizing happenings (e.g., losing a job, divorce), unstructured social settings (e.g., casual sex), and role changes or transitions (e.g., becoming an adult) in which there are no clear or well-established rules and scripts for how to behave, how to feel or what to expect.

Regarding the former, single motherhood is a good case in point of a novel and unfamiliar situation that can be profoundly disorienting for many women. Whether a personal decision or a consequence of life’s vicissitudes, becoming a single mother is a challenging situation to navigate, involving questions of self-worth, competence, and autonomy, as well as negotiating of one’s role and identity within prevailing cultural norms regarding family structure. Raising a child without sharing the responsibility is often accompanied by economic hardships, ambivalent societal attitudes, limited personal freedom, fewer job opportunities, struggles to handle multiple tasks, and dealing with policies that are still designed to favor (heterosexual) marriage, to name a few. Sole responsibility also entails serious doubts concerning proper parenting and children’s future development, so seeking constant guidance and help from family network support are habitual behaviors to cope with the burdens of single parenthood and the vital changes associated with it. Not surprisingly, the market for parenting advice, especially for first-time parents, has multiplied in the last decades (Virani et al., 2019), including self-help literature, parenting influencers, counseling services, and smartphone applications. Dor (2021) points out, whereas some mothers cherish the exclusivity of decision-making concerning the education of their children —itself also a source of hesitation and uncertainty—, too often difficulties overcome the perks: most single mothers report high levels of emotional distress and exhaustion, a drastic reduction of leisure and social life, and feelings of confusion, loneliness, and existential anxiety.

De-stabilizing happenings that, to a broader or lesser extent, alter people’s life order and threaten individuals’ perception of themselves tend to be profoundly disorienting, as well. Losing one’s job is a paradigmatic example of this. Work is an essential source of income, stability, and social relationships in adulthood and a core aspect of one’s identity, self-worth, and a sense of purpose in society (Krause, 2014). Unfortunately, unemployment commonly alters all that significantly. Being jobless entails substantial breakdowns of established habits and time structuring; brings important social status and social networks changes, hovers the performance of other personal roles (parent, husband, friend); lowers future expectations; and comes with a generalized and burdensome sense of de-securitization. As a result, individuals who lose their jobs are more distressed, less satisfied with their lives, marriages, and friendships, and more likely to report severe psychological problems than the employed. Narrative analyses also show that whereas some get to manage the crisis reasonably well, the unemployed tend to feel significantly more frustrated and confused in their everyday lives and perceive lower control over themselves and their circumstances (Blustein et al., 2013). In this regard, de-stabilizing happenings such as losing a job bring enormous volatility to people’s lives, thus making these situations potentially disorienting.

In the same vein, unstructured social settings are also commonly disorienting given their marked ambiguity. A good example is the increasing ambiguity and confusion surrounding emerging forms of intimate and sexual relationships, a topic extensively analyzed by Illouz (2019). With a view on interactionism, Illouz shows how the realms of heterosexual love, intimacy, and sex are permeated by what she calls “frame confusion” and “frame uncertainty,” that is, an increasing difficulty for individuals to know “how to define, evaluate, or conduct the relationships they enter into according to predictable and stable social scripts” (Illouz, 2019: 9). Although some might live such unclear interactions in a playful and joyful way, Illouz demonstrates that this lack of clarity when it comes to defining the situation, identifying one’s status in the relationship, and orienting oneself in it commonly prompts feelings of shame, discomfort, anxiety, and insecurity —especially in women, since such disorienting relations tend to generate asymmetries of power and choice related to gender.

Finally, transitions in social roles can be highly disorienting. A good example of this is coming of age, which has been extensively analyzed by Silva (2015) in the context of today’s young generations. Through ethnographic studies of middle-class youth and adolescents, Silva questions what it means for current generations to grow up, showing that traditional cultural markers of adulthood —leaving home, graduating from highschool, stable employment, marriage, parenthood, financial independence— have become increasingly delayed, disordered, unworkable, or even abandoned, leaving a younger generation not only disappointed in what they had taken for granted but also increasingly disoriented in terms of their identities and expectations. For better or worse, traditional markers provided clear milestones for people to evaluate their progress in life, orient themselves in society, and define the contours of a meaningful life. As these markers have become less available, however, it has become increasingly important for individuals to find new and legitimate sources of guidance and meaning. In this regard, Silva points out that younger generations have found two of their main compasses in the mood economy and therapeutic culture, learning that in a highly fluid, uncertain, and anxiety-inducing context, the keys to orientation and adaptation lie not externally but internally, to viz., in the capacity of the self to be in constant remaking. As Silva asserts, “young men and women [today] inhabit a mood economy in which legitimacy and self-worth are purchased not with traditional currencies such as work or marriage or class solidarity but instead through the ability to organize their emotions into a narrative of self-transformation” (Silva, 2015: 18).

As previously stated, the characterization of any event, environment, or context as disorienting is something that cannot be determined a priori. Again, whereas some settings and circumstances in life are potentially more disorienting than others, no situation is inherently disorienting but ultimately depends on the interaction between the environment and the individual. Likewise, however common, disorientation is not conceived as an internal state or a psychological trait from an interactionist perspective but as a situated appraisal that individuals make of the environment and their relation to it. As mentioned, traumatic happenings such as being diagnosed with a severe illness or more common events like losing a job or becoming a first-time parent may be disorienting for some people but not for others.

Certain personal contingencies and individual factors play an important and moderating role. For instance, particular contingencies in people’s life, such as having a stable financial situation or a strong family network, might make disorienting events like losing a job or becoming a first-time parent less disorienting. Similarly, individual differences like tolerance to uncertainty or previous similar experiences also impact how disorienting situations are perceived. Regarding the former, people differ in how they tolerate uncertainty, that is, in their tendency to avoid ambiguity and to feel worried and anxious about the future outcomes of their actions. Since disorientation always implies great uncertainty about what to expect, individuals with a higher tolerance to uncertainty would be better equipped to deal with the adverse effects of disorientation. For its part, past experiences would also play a moderating role, as individuals who have gone through similar situations tend to generalize and apply such experiences when reading and navigating potentially disorienting environments.

Disorientation and Culture

Besides analyzing specific social situations, adopting a broader focus on culture is also paramount from an interactionist perspective when analyzing psycho-social phenomena. Interactionists’ efforts to reject any form of dualism entail bridging the individual-context dichotomy as much as connecting both micro and macro social events (Plummer, 2000). Understanding disorientation from this perspective thus requires further framing its examination within wider the cultural and socioeconomic hardships and challenges of the present. Interestingly, addressing the relationship between disorientation and culture can develop in two different yet interrelated ways: we may talk about “disorientation in culture,” thus emphasizing how specific cultural and socioeconomic dynamics and challenges of the present impact people emotionally, and we could talk about “the culture of disorientation,” thus stressing the value of disorientation as a powerful metaphor to characterize contemporary era in a broader, more general sense —in a way similar to Furedi (2006) and Beck (2000), for instance, have talked about “the culture of fear” or “the risk society,” respectively. For the purposes of the paper, the section concentrates on the first approach to the matter.

One of the main reasons why disorientation has acquired particular interest following the COVID-19 crisis is that the disorienting effects of the pandemic have extended beyond specific persons, events, and situations, becoming a collective and global as much as an individual matter (Means & Slater, 2021). After three years of an unprecedented pandemic that has upended the lives of millions of people around the world, an essential question that still haunts many who find it hard to adjust and go on in the particularly unpredictable scenario that opens before them is one concerning their immediate and near future: “what now?” The question, beyond deeper existential concerns, caters to the practical need for many of having to reexamine their personal goals and priorities, reconstruct social relations, retrieve familiar points of reference, and rethink the course of their lives to re-orient themselves in a context of significant transformations in the structures of work, social relationships, economy, and digital information.

Although set in motion already in pre-pandemic times, most of these transformations have accelerated following the COVID-19 crisis and the most recent international turmoil triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the violent conflict between Israel and Palestine. Indeed, post-pandemic societies seem to face a much more unstable present and unpredictable future than roughly five years ago. Factors such as the deceleration in economic growth, the rising economic inflation, the significant contraction of the middleclass, the increasing rates of poverty and economic inequality, the surge of political polarization and radicalization, or the worrisome spread of misinformation in social media add to the alarming consumption of tranquilizers and the escalating precarity in the sphere of labor as current cultural challenges of substantial de-stabilizing consequences in people’s lives.

Regarding this latter, work precarity is perhaps among the most significant difficulties that post-pandemic societies will face in the next decade and one of the leading disruptive factors contributing to the increasing sense of disorientation of the present. Precarity is certainly the everyday context for millions of people and a first-degree political and public health issue, with work instability and insecurity affecting 61% of workers today (Benavides et al., 2022). The ill effects of precarity are manifold and well-documented. For instance, there is solid evidence that constant uncertainty inherent to work precarity harms mental health and job satisfaction (Pfeffer, 2018). There is also evidence that precarious workers are more likely to present a disrupted sense of self, degraded self-esteem, and internalized loss of control (Selenko et al., 2017). Work precarity’s inherent unpredictability and uncertainty are also behind the limited capacity of many people to autonomously adapt and cope with unexpected changes, navigate their present, and plan their future (Allan et al., 2021).

Whereas precarious work was once associated with unskilled workers and underprivileged sectors of society, precarity now reflects a much broader socio-cultural trend whereby a growing number of workers are locked into unpredictable working and living conditions. Indeed, for many citizens, the disorienting experience of having to navigate their present and plan their immediate future on increasing fragile assumptions, insecure living conditions, and a constantly shifting environment is becoming more and more common (Bode & Lüth, 2021). Not by accident, the management of disorientation has become a prior interest for individuals, whose search for guidance and quick-fix answers in more and more areas of their everyday lives has spiked in the past two years: demands for professional psychological therapy have doubled since 2020, and the consumption of self-help literature, coaching services, and counseling advice hit record numbers in 2021 —with the market of personal development expected to grow at a rate of 5.5% annually in the coming years (Bethune, 2021).

As post-pandemic societies move to a phase of heightened uncertainty and volatility, mental health and life satisfaction also scale as important challenges ahead. On the one hand, mental health conditions are increasing worldwide. For example, cases of major depressive disorders (MDD) and anxiety disorders (AD) have increased by a massive 27.6% and 25.6% in the past two years, respectively; feelings of loneliness and helplessness have doubled to around 25%; and work-related symptoms of stress, exhaustion, and fatigue have raised by a 38% since 2019 (Baarck et al., 2021). Broken down by social sectors, the young and the most vulnerable sectors of society are the hardest hit, being among the social groups presenting the highest rates of mental distress and severe psychological problems —including suicidal tendencies (Scarpetta et al., 2021).

On the other hand, political and labor discontent is growing, too. Recent data gathered across 28 nations worldwide shows that 63% of the population thinks their countries are “on the wrong track” (Gebrekal, 2022); people’s trust in governments and public institutions has significantly declined in the past two years (Dennison & Puglierin, 2021); and 80% of employees worldwide currently report to be not engaged or actively disengaged at work (Gandhi & Robison, 2021). A not-so-distant and symptomatic response to this generalized discontent at work can be found in what came to be known as the “Great Resignation,” a global movement that, under the slogan “whatever the situation is, I want better,” led to a record number of adult workers around the globe to quit their jobs voluntarily —it was estimated that in the United States alone, 47.4 million people decided to leave their jobs in 2021 (Tappe, 2021). Relatedly, current studies suggest that the increasing discontent with work conditions is leading many to deeply reexamine their life projects, reconsider alternatives, and prioritize mental and physical health over careers (Jiskrova, 2022).

Within this sociocultural context, addressing disorientation as an emotional experience can further our understanding of how social and cultural forces and structures (e.g., precariousness, misinformation, economic inequality) impact people’s lives (e.g., social interactions, mental health, identity, self-worth), both socially and individually. It can also advance our comprehension of how different individuals and groups of individuals cope with such impact and navigate the ambiguous and unpredictable scenarios that open before them. Whereas more studies in this line of research are needed, disorientation might be a powerful emotional construct to understand how an increasing number of people experience the world today.

Conclusion

Disorientation is a multidisciplinary concept. Whether associated with its spatial meaning or its non-spatial, more metaphorical conceptualization, numerous disciplines have used disorientation to describe a broad range of cultural, social, and psychological phenomena. The versatility of disorientation bears both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it makes disorientation a broad and transversal topic that speaks to many problems, areas, and disciplines and a powerful metaphor for the contemporary era. On the other hand, the many-sided nature of disorientation makes it a difficult concept to define and establish a unified, precise understanding around it. However, although disorientation has been addressed from multiple perspectives in the last decades, the focus on the concept from an emotional perspective remains scarce. To fill this gap and expand the current investigation on the topic, this paper has attempted to outline an introductory approach to the study of disorientation. With strong ties to pragmatism, phenomenology, and social constructionism, interactionism has been taken as the main framework for discussion. While there are important differences among these perspectives, they also share significant similarities in emphasizing the active and reflective role of the individual in understanding emotions and the need to situate the analysis of emotional experience at the intersection of the individual, culture, and society (e.g., Harris, 2000; Rehman, 2018; Szanto, 2015).

From this perspective, emotions are understood as meaning-making processes arising in significant person-event transactions and not solely in the situation or the individual. A primary task of interactionism is hence to inquire into what conditions elicit certain emotions, how individuals appraise those situations as emotional, and what psychological consequences are involved. Following this framework, the paper has first defined disorientation as a distressful feeling characterized by a more or less sustained sense of loss of control, unfamiliarity, and uncertainty about oneself (how do I go on) and one’s future (what to expect), generally triggered by a disruptive or challenging event or environment in which individual’s “thinking and behaving as usual” turns unworkable to read, adapt, and navigate the situation. In this regard, the paper has provided examples of situations that, given their unfamiliarity, ambiguity, or disruptive psychological effects, are potentially disorienting. Whereas traumatic happenings have been presented as paradigmatic instances of potentially disorienting events, the paper has argued that disorienting events are also found in everyday life contexts. This makes disorientation not merely an exceptional but an ordinary emotional experience with great potential to understand how everyday settings and broader social and cultural environments make it difficult for individuals to know what they should believe, what goals they should pursue, what actions they should prioritize, and how they should conduct themselves to navigate their present successfully.

The study of disorientation introduces a novel look to expand the inquiry into the social and cultural determinants of psychological distress and how they relate to complex emotional (e.g., vulnerability, apathy, uncertainty, depression, anxiety) and cognitive processes (e.g., meaning-making, identity, self-conception). As mental health raises top research and political concerns, new concepts able to cover so far unexplored sources and consequences of social and psychological distress would make an important theoretical and practical addition to the area. Further, disorientation delves into the ongoing need to bridge longstanding dichotomies between individual and context, culture and society, or structure and agency in understanding emotions, emphasizing the interactionist argument that emotions arise at the interface between culture, society, and the individual. In this regard, the study of disorientation calls for an open, multidisciplinary approach to human behavior that benefits from philosophical and social research as well as historical, psychological, and anthropological developments in the field of emotions.

This paper has been the first to approach the concept from an interactionist perspective. As such, the paper entails a preliminary rather than a conclusive examination. Future studies should therefore develop this line of inquiry, further explore disorientation from an interactionist perspective, and engage in cross-disciplinary debates about the concept.