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During most winters, there come days when it should be freezing and miserable but instead it’s beautiful. Where last year it was raining ice, this year it is unseasonably warm, and maybe even sunny. Pleasant in the sun, cool in the shade, low humidity. The sort of day where, if it happens to be a weekday, you might decide to take the dog on an extra-long walk after work. And if it happens to be a weekend, you might decide to make a picnic lunch, take it down to the creek or the lake or the park, and soak it in.

You might feel joy, and pleasure, at the warmth of the day. And then you may experience a second emotion. That second emotion, like a cold undercurrent sweeping against your legs as you bob in a temperate ocean, is one that recognizes that the is of the day is quite a long way from the ought of the day. That emotion recognizes, too, that a lot of that divergence in weather is likely due to the oncoming climate catastrophe.

More and more such gorgeous winter days exist for the same reasons that—for example—Phoenix experienced triple-digit temperatures for 113 straight days during the summer of 2024. For the same reason that smoke from Canadian wildfires recently made New York look like Blade Runner. That the home insurance market appears to be collapsing in Florida. The same reasons that Asheville, North Carolina, in the mountains, experienced a thousand-year rain event this fall. That nearly 36 inches of rain fell on Greece from a medicane, the same storm system that catastrophically flooded Libya. That Southern California suffered such devastating fires early this year.

That complex emotion—elation at the unlikely beauty of the day, combined with a deep, existential dread about the underlying causes of the beauty of the day—is an idea without a widely accepted name. But it needs one.

I immediately thought of German as the most likely language to produce such a word. The grammar of German means that it is a language in many ways uniquely suited to combining existing words to make longer but highly specific portmanteaus.

Many of us are already familiar with schadenfreude, which, for example, is the combination of the German words for “harm” and “joy.” Among Germany’s other greatest portmanteau exports are weltschmerz, a combination of welt for “world” and schmerz for “pain,” meaning a “sensation of melancholy and world-weariness.” Another beauty is torschlusspanik, from Tor schluss (“gate closed”) and panik (“panic”), and suggesting the “fear of time running out … the fear of opportunities closing forever as you get older.” And of course who could forget fledermaus, meaning literally a “flutter mouse” and referring to a bat (and a Strauss opera). A portmanteau of English words, apocabliss (apocalypse and bliss, of course) has been floated as a word for an unseasonably warm day, but strikes me as an overly cheery way to describe an emotion that is, ultimately, a little grim.

I knew that the German language could come through with a mashup that had sufficient gravitas, but it is a language that I have not studied since the fall of sixth grade. So I wrote my friend Mike Tyka, a biophysicist and artist who thinks a lot about climate change. Mike, a German national who normally lives in the Pacific Northwest, is spending this year with his family in Germany. If anyone could help me figure out what the German word would be, it would be him.

And he came through. A day after I emailed him, he emailed me back, offering up endzeitgemütlichkeit, a combination of endzeit, meaning “end-times,” and gemütlichkeit, meaning “coziness,” with a further sense of calmness and belonging and peace of mind. He noted that what I was describing was a familiar and widespread emotion: Just as we enjoy a warm winter day, it was a “similar experience for those who enjoyed the greatly improved view from the rear part of the sinking Titanic, which was known to briefly rise sharply.”

This was a great start, but I wasn’t fully convinced: At six syllables, it seemed unlikely to me that endzeitgemütlichkeit could catch on in the same way that the more compact, four-syllable schadenfreude has. And I, at least, find gemütlichkeit tricky to pronounce. Trying to get my lips and tongue from the ge- to the umlaut, then back around to the -lichkeit was, frankly, too much. And finally, I don’t know that “peace of mind” is precisely the right connotation: After all, the emotion I was trying to capture is one in which our state of mind is precisely not able to be fully at peace.

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Endzeit was definitely a keeper, though. I opened up a thesaurus and Google Translate and started working up some alternatives. These included:

Endzeitgemütlich, which as far as I can tell would just be “end-times cozy” rather than “coziness,” which connotes all the same things to me with fewer syllables, but the pronunciation of which continued to make me feel as though I had burned my tongue.

Then there was endzeitjubeln, “end-times cheer,” which, like the previous attempts, concludes with a difficult-to-pronounce-to-English-speakers ln combination.

On the other hand, endzeitkomfort, “end-times comfort,” frankly sounds insufficiently German. More to the point, it’s not comfort per se that we’re discussing—but rather joy and pleasure. For the same reason, Tyka’s additional suggestion of endzeitbehagen (“end-times contentment”) does not quite fit.

But “end-times joy” would translate as endzeitfreude, which sounds too much like schadenfreude and at the same time sounds like we’re taking joy in the fact of the end-times. I wanted to focus on experiencing the pleasure of a moment despite the end of the world, not because of it.

And so at last I typed “end times pleasure” into the translator bot and found the word I was looking for: endzeitvergnügen.

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I ran this, and the other possibilities, past Tyka, who laughed at me for asking for a German word, then complaining that it was too long (guilty as charged). He continued to lean toward his original choice. He also noted that in German, “it is the ‘endzeit’ itself that is the object of the ‘vergnügen.’ ” That is, “it implies somewhat that you are enjoying the fact that it is the end-times, rather than enjoying a side effect of the reason for the end-times.” Still, for my purposes, I think it works.

And so: endzeitvergnügen. One more syllable than schadenfreude but still one fewer than endzeitgemütlichkeit—and mostly pronounceable to English speakers like myself. And, too, dovetailing with the old Volkswagen commercial campaign, fahrvergnügen. You remember those commercials? The ones advertising the driving pleasure of the VW? The precise same fossil fuel–burning pleasure that is helping drive the climate catastrophe—the climate chaos that brings us the enjoyment of an unseasonably warm day, underscored with existential dread?

So there you have it, folks: end-times pleasure. Endzeitvergnügen is the new schadenfreude.