It’s hard to describe, but there’s a word I once came across that helped me name it: sonder—the realisation that every single person around you is living a life as full and vivid and tangled as your own. Their own hopes, dreams, regrets, routines, heartbreaks. Their own inherited madness and quiet pride.
You’ll never know their story. But for a moment, if you let it hit you, it’s overwhelming. The sheer scale of it. The infinite stories playing out just beyond your line of sight.
I feel it most on planes, in doctors’ waiting rooms, hospital corridors, or sometimes just wandering around the shops—places where people’s guards are down and time stretches a bit. You catch a flicker of someone’s life in a gesture or a line of conversation, and you realise: I’ll never know what that meant to them. I’ll never know the full story. But it was their story. It mattered.
That kind of awareness can make the world feel crowded and tender at the same time. Your own life might feel impossibly rich and personal—flooded with hormones, full of emotional peaks and troughs—but it’s all been felt before, over and over again. No feeling is truly unique to you.
A blur of strangers becomes a tapestry. A routine moment becomes a stage for quiet epics you’ll never witness. And suddenly, the mundane is no longer mundane.
It doesn’t make life easier, really. But it makes it richer. I try to carry that with me—a bit of wonder, a bit of softness. Because behind every passing face is someone who’s living through something.
And if you remember that, even just occasionally, it changes how you move through the world.
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