All the Feels book cover — five overlapping circles in muted orange, red, blue, purple, and olive on a black ground, one for each Kingdom of Feels

A new book by Robert Kurzban

All the Feels

The Evolved Function of Every Human Emotion and Sensation

A life without pain sounds wonderful. It would also be fatal. Pain feels bad because it has a job: measuring damage to your body and motivating you to protect it. Every other feeling has a job too, built by natural selection. Hunger measures your need for calories and motivates you to eat. Envy measures others’ success and motivates you to close the gap. Frustration measures the futility of your current approach and motivates you to try a new one.

In All the Feels, evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban explains the evolved function of every one of your emotions and sensations, from anger to the urge to yawn, organizing them the way biologists organize species, into four main Kingdoms and Monera, a cabinet of oddballs such as déjà vu and the mysterious urge to squeeze something cute. Understanding what each feeling is measuring, what it’s asking you to do, and why, will change the way you think about your feelings.

Read a sample Feel Coming September 30, 2026
As heard on Modern Wisdom · The Dissenter · Maiden Mother Matriarch · The Brainy Business · Quillette All appearances →

Praise

Early word

“Imagine if Darwin wrote a hilarious and accessible field guide to every feeling a person can have. That’s Kurzban’s All the Feels: a mind-blowing whistle-stop tour of why you feel everything from awe to embarrassment to loneliness to euphoria.”

— David EaglemanNeuroscientist, Stanford University; author of Livewired and Incognito

The organizing idea

74 Feels. Five Kingdoms.

Linnaeus sorted life into Kingdoms, Phyla, and species. All the Feels does the same for your inner life — every emotion and sensation filed by the job it evolved to do.

Explore the complete taxonomy Download the poster (PDF)

From the collection

Deal me a Feel

Seventy-four specimens in the collection. Draw one.

All the Feels 74 specimens · five Kingdoms

Praise

More early word

“A delightful and insightful tour of the garden of feelings. This is now the go-to volume for the panoply of emotion.”

— Martin E. P. SeligmanFounder of positive psychology; past president, American Psychological Association

“Rob Kurzban creates the Elgin marbles of feeling — excising everything unnecessary until readers are left with a beautiful understanding of what each feel is, does, and is for. He does it with characteristic wit, humor, and extremely readable prose. This is the book to read if you want to understand how emotions work (and maybe work on your emotions).”

— Jaimie KremsAssociate Professor of Psychology, UCLA

“Kurzban has done more than anyone since Darwin to illuminate the evolutionary origins of human emotions. Read it to discover the true nature of humanity.”

— Michael ShermerFounding publisher of Skeptic magazine; longtime Scientific American columnist

“All the Feels is both wildly entertaining and deeply humane. Kurzban treats every human sensation, from hunger to heartbreak, as a small evolutionary marvel. I came away with even more compassion for the strange, feeling creatures we are.”

— Scott Barry KaufmanPsychologist; author of Transcend

“An ambitious and systematic mapping of the entire landscape of human emotional experience through an evolutionary lens.”

— Robin HansonAssociate Professor of Economics, George Mason University; author of The Elephant in the Brain

Showing our work

Every claim, sourced

All the Feels rests on the research literature. Every one of its 937 citations is mapped to the exact claim it supports — browse them by Feel, or read the complete bibliography of 810 references.

Sources by Feel Reference List

Read a Feel

Fossils Feels

Rob dissects individual Feels on his Substack, The Living Fossils. Here are three to get you started:

The sensation

The Need to Pee

“When ya gotta go ya gotta go. Or do you?”

Read on Substack → The drive

Curiosity

“It’s not just a rover.”

Read on Substack → The urge

Cute Crushing

“I will hold him and squeeze him and call him George.”

Read on Substack →

The author

Robert Kurzban

Robert Kurzban is an evolutionary psychologist who was a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania for over a decade. He is the author of Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite and coauthor of The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind, both published by Princeton University Press. He writes the Substack The Living Fossils, where he explores how evolutionary ideas can help explain human psychology, especially the reasons behind human suffering and well-being.

Praise for his previous book

Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite

“One of the best evolutionary psychologists of his generation…genuinely clever, sly, succinct, and sometimes hilarious.”

— Steven PinkerHarvard psychologist; author of How the Mind Works

“Here is a fun counterpoint to the explosion of examples showing that humans do not act in accordance with the predictions of standard rational models…Kurzban seeks an understanding of why our actions may appear contradictory in particular contexts, but serve us well in others.”

— Vernon L. SmithNobel Laureate in Economics