Sonder

John Koenig coined "sonder" in 2012 for his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a project creating words for emotions we feel but can't name. The term blends French "sonder" (to probe) with German "sonder" (special), capturing that peculiar vertigo when you realize the random person on the train has an entire universe inside them—complete with their own recurring anxieties, private jokes, and unfinished arguments. It went viral because millions recognized they'd been feeling this their whole lives without language for it.

Urban environments are sonder's natural habitat—dense cities force us into physical proximity with strangers whose lives remain utterly opaque to us. A 2018 psychology study found that commuters who actively practiced sonder (imagining detailed backstories for fellow passengers) reported 23% higher life satisfaction and increased empathy markers. The catch? It only worked when they didn't then check their phones, suggesting sonder requires sustained, imaginative attention that modern life actively discourages.

Philosophers call the opposite of sonder "solipsism"—the belief that only your own mind is certain to exist. Sonder acts as a cognitive vaccine against this narcissistic trap, which therapists increasingly link to anxiety and depression in the social media age. When you're drowning in your own narrative, sonder offers an escape hatch: those 8 billion other people aren't just extras in your movie, they're all directing their own films in which you don't even have a speaking role.

Neuroscientists discovered that reading literary fiction activates the same brain regions involved in experiencing sonder—specifically the temporoparietal junction, which handles perspective-taking. This suggests novels are essentially sonder simulators, letting us practice recognizing complex inner lives in safe, controlled doses. Writers like Virginia Woolf mastered this in works like "Mrs. Dalloway," where we watch Clarissa fixate on her party while war veteran Septimus spirals toward suicide blocks away, their vastly different realities unfolding simultaneously in the same London afternoon.

Social media creates a paradox: more access to others' lives but less authentic sonder. We see curated highlights, not the mundane complexity—the forgotten passwords, the drawer of tangled cables, the 3am doubts—that makes real people real. Research shows that Instagram use correlates with decreased empathy, possibly because algorithmic feeds train us to judge and scroll rather than sit with the uncomfortable vastness of another person's full existence. True sonder requires what the feed denies: patience and imagination.

You can deliberately cultivate sonder as a practice: pick a stranger, notice one specific detail (their scuffed shoes, their ringtone choice), and spend 60 seconds constructing their entire day backwards from that moment. This "reverse engineering" exercise strengthens what psychologists call "theory of mind"—your capacity to model other consciousnesses—which atrophies without use. Regular practitioners report feeling less lonely in crowds and more forgiving in conflicts, as if remembering everyone else is the protagonist of an equally complicated story.