Can ‘done’ be an emotion like joy and sadness?
Since around 2000, and especially since the pandemic, people have increasingly been declaring themselves “done” or “so done.”
Staff
“Is done an emotion?” a friend asked me recently. It’s a popular question, posed on social media and printed on humorous T-shirts and mugs, followed by “because I feel it in my soul.” Clearly done resonates with many people, but what does it mean to feel this way? And could this past participle of the verb to do be considered an emotion?
We all know how to interpret “I’m done with the report” – it means “I’ve finished it.” But as a BBC site for language learners points out, done can also imply the opposite. “I’m just so done with writing this report” means the report is not finished and the person working on it is “irritated and bored by it,” and doesn’t want to continue. Since around 2000, and especially since the pandemic, people have increasingly been declaring themselves “done” or “so done.”
Some people who announce that they are “done” might still be expressing irritation. Others might be employing the word as it was used in the 16th century, meaning “tired, exhausted, beaten, defeated.”
Today’s done starts in this exhaustion, then moves beyond it. “I am so done” is a declaration of resignation, a refusal to engage any longer, a stepping back. It’s a state beyond irritation, beyond tiredness, beyond struggle. It’s not a powerful effusion, like anger, fear, or joy, but a refocusing of attention away from something.
Etymologically at least, it is hard to identify done as an emotion. Emotion comes from the Latin emovere, “move out, agitate,” and when it was first used in English in the mid-16th century it referred to “political agitation ... a public commotion or uprising.” When a historian wrote in 1683 that “the last years of the Reign of Charles V caused some Emotions in the Cities,” he meant that there were riots. Soon, individuals as well as body politics could have emotions, as the word came to mean “an agitation of mind, an excited mental state.”
The definition has always been more inclusive than exclusive, and pretty much anything anyone has ever felt has been called an “emotion” at some point.
Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to “the emotions of benevolence and complacency”; listicles like “10 ultra-specific emotions you never knew you had” include Torschlusspanik (“gate-closing panic”), the stress over time running out, and sonder, the realization that every person you pass has an interior life that is just as vivid to them as yours is to you.
Given that usage of “I’m so done” has gone up 200 times since 2000, according to Google’s Ngram Viewer, it seems to be filling a linguistic need. Is it, strictly speaking, an emotion? Sure, why not? I’m done.