Sonder: Blink and You Miss a Universe

To me, passersby. To them, entire lives.

I first heard the word sonder ten years ago in college when a senior suggested we use it as a vote of assent while planning a fundraiser. She couldn’t quite explain it, and fair enough, because it’s slippery and elusive. At the height of my teenage arrogance, I was THRILLED to use such an exquisite word that still, to this day, gets the red dotted underline.

The more you know, reader, sonder is a word from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, coined in 2012 by John Koenig. It’s quite profound and esoteric to define. But let’s give it a go in a way you and I both understand. Sonder is half Gen Z, meaning we all have Main Character Energy, and half Shakespearean, in that “all the world’s a stage.” So, if we mishmash the two, we get sonder. We are all actors, main characters in our own dramatization of life, sometimes understudies or supporting roles in others’, but more often than not, non-player characters in someone else’s story where they are the lead. Profound and esoteric. Which is why, try to read on.

And then, fundraiser done, poof. Gone from my head. Till Pinterest, my eternal artsy rabbit hole, threw it back at me. Sonder.

Listen, I love me a good ensemble. LOVE. Modern Family. FRIENDS. Every corny sprawling holiday movie ever, Love Actually, New Year’s Eve. And *animatedly taps table like a lunatic* BOOKS! At the drop of a hat I will yell about The Authenticity Project. WHOO!

*calms down* 

Because here’s the thing. The idea, the thought, the FACT that our lives are unique but also overlapping and tangled gives me the heebie-jeebies, in the BEST way. Like everyone walking around has their own movie running, their own heartbreak montage, their own coffee shop subplot, and we’re just extras, cameos, background pedestrians in it. I mean??? How is that not blowing your mind right now.

And okay fine, physicists don’t come at me, but what if this is the parallel universe? Like we are each the sun of our own story, blasting main character energy, but in other people’s lives we’re just supporting roles. Or worse. Prop movers.

That’s why sonder haunts me. Because it’s exhilarating and unsettling all at once. It tells me why we fall into friendships that feel fated, why we stumble into people we’re sure we were meant to meet, and also why sometimes, painfully, we drift.

To put it simply, sonder means everyone has a story. What we miss out on is reading it.

In a world where even reading a book feels like a dying habit, it’s no surprise we’re losing patience in reading people. And... why not, right? We doomscroll. We live in one-minute increments, where even an Instagram reel feels too long. Instead of talking to a living, breathing human, we turn to AI to console us and validate our feelings. And the lives that exist behind us in pictures, the strangers, the movement, the blur, we use tools to clean them up, to erase them, to make the frame neater. Like it’s that easy. To just erase the background extras.

Recently, while traveling by train, after twenty-something years, I found myself a spectator in transit. Thanks to my profession, being a fly on the wall has become second nature. I can sit back and watch.

There was a toddler sitting on the platform, flanked by her family, dusting talc on her face. And it was the happiest thing I saw that day. She didn’t care that she was sitting right there on the ground, not on a bench, or a suitcase, or a clean sheet, but on the platform itself. What mattered to her was the joy of a scented powder.

And then I thought of myself, comfortable in an air-conditioned coach, reading a book, sipping warm cutting chai, still feeling that something was amiss. But that sight, that small, radiant moment, broke a ghost of a smile across my face.

I don’t know what this is about. Is it the trend? Is it the endless advice from woke, overqualified creators talking about boundaries and self-care?

I feel that boundaries can be bridges people cross if you let them, but we’ve turned them into fortresses of solitude. I feel that self-care can be something that honours our existence in the macrocosm of being, but instead, we use it to distance ourselves from one another. We chase labels. We search for boxes to squeeze into. But we don’t know what for.

This generation believes in Main Character Energy and NPCs. That’s what our skewed lenses allow us to see.

Hence, sonder. The gut-punch of a thought that everyone out there has their own chaos, their own playlists, people they miss, grocery lists, bad habits, inside jokes, all spinning right next to yours. Whole universes existing side by side, brushing past for a blink before peeling away again. And you? Maybe just a blur, a stranger on their train, a name they never learn.

My homeboy Lemony Snicket said, It is terribly rude to tell people that their troubles are boring. I could not agree more. There’s a world bigger than you, bigger than me, bigger than us. Let’s be a part of it, not apart from it.