Sometime not too long ago, this image or one like it appeared in a corner of the internet. It's beautiful in the eloquence of its words, the simplicity of its image, and most importantly, the universality of its sentiment.
sonder
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
Sonder first appeared with this English-language definition at the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows in November 2012. From the looks of Twitter, most users have no idea that this is not an archaic English word and have embraced it as their own.
This word can be real because we want it to be real, because it is a sentiment that we experience every day. As we move into the increasing connectivity and yet increased isolation of the digital world, we need a word like this to encapsulate our experience as just one tiny dot among 7 billion others.
Go viral, sonder. We need more words like you.
