You’re walking down the street, or sitting on a bus, and for a moment you look at the people around you: a stranger on the phone, a woman waiting for the light to change, a boy with headphones on. For most of the day, these people stay in the background of your life — extras, blurred, almost non-people. Then, sometimes, a different flash arrives: you truly understand that each of them has a life as complicated and vivid as your own, full of loves, worries, memories, a whole childhood, a family waiting for them at home. For that flash, English now has a word: sonder.
Sonder isn’t a “real” word in the traditional sense — it was coined in 2012 by American writer John Koenig for his project “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” (later published as a book by Simon & Schuster in 2021), a collection of words invented specifically to name emotions we all feel but that language hadn’t yet captured. Koenig’s original definition is almost poetic: “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… an epic story that continues invisibly around you.”
Why do we actually need this word? Because our minds habitually do exactly the opposite. In 2001, psychologists Emily Pronin, Justin Kruger, Kenneth Savitsky, and Lee Ross published a now-classic study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology on what’s called the “illusion of asymmetric insight”: we tend to believe we know others better than they know us, and to experience ourselves as full of nuance and hidden thought, while perceiving others as simpler, more predictable, almost one-dimensional. It’s a quiet but heavy bias: it’s easier to quickly judge someone who seems “just” a rude cashier or a driver who cut us off, if we forget that behind that behaviour is an entire day we know nothing about.
Practising sonder, even for a few seconds a day, is a small exercise against this autopilot. Today, try pausing on some random person — whoever serves your coffee, whoever walks slowly in front of you — and honestly imagine what kind of whole life they might have. It won’t change their day. But it will probably, a little, change yours.
Sources
- Koenig, J. (2021). The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Simon & Schuster. (Original project since 2012, dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com)
- Pronin, E., Kruger, J., Savitsky, K., & Ross, L. (2001). You don’t know me, but I know you: The illusion of asymmetric insight. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(4), 639–656.
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