Sonder

Sometimes the feelings or emotions or meanings that we wish to convey run up against the limits of the everyday language that we use.

This is probably one reason why we have poetry. As Tracy K. Smith put it evocatively in a conversation with Ezra Klein:

“Poetry is the language that sits really close to feelings that defy language.”

It’s a phrase that I often keep thinking about.

Whenever we try to convey something and run headfirst into the limits of the language that we use, we often try to find shortcuts. Somehow we muddle through. Somehow we make do with the words that we know.

But some special people rebel against these limits and try to create new words.

John Koenig seems like one of those people.

Koenig is the creator of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a project devoted to inventing words for emotions and experiences for which we don’t quite have words.

The reason why I know of John Koenig is because of one word, a neologism that he coined called sonder.

I first came across the word in this Substack post by Olivia Jarrell, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

It has stuck in my mental craw because it’s such a brilliant word. It’s deep and capacious.

Sonder

The realization that every random person, every stranger, is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.

It is the realization that behind every ordinary face lies a person who has his or her own ambitions, routines, worries, inner monologues, fears, hopes, dreams and anxieties.

Beautiful word, isn’t it?

Sonder.

There wasn’t a single trigger for writing this post. In a way, this has been many, many, many months in the making.

The reason why I’ve been thinking about sonder is because of some of the conversations that I have been having with people really close to me.

These are people I have known for a long time, people I otherwise thought I knew. And yet, some of the conversations I’ve had with them recently spectacularly shattered the illusion that I knew these people, or that I was good at judging people.

The kind of vivid interiority these people possessed, I could scarcely have guessed, let alone imagined.

These conversations made me realise that people are far more complex, far more layered, far more dense, far more amorphous than I otherwise believed.

As obvious as it sounds, it’s something we often forget.

Or, I don’t want to speak for others. It’s something that I often keep forgetting.

I often have very simplistic notions of a lot of the people I come across, and I constantly keep forgetting that every person has a rich inner life, a rich life of their own.

In writing about this, it does seem like we engage in a kind of lossy compression when it comes to comprehending people.

And lossy compression is good.

If you had to sonder every random stranger you came across, your brain would probably explode. You’d have a nervous breakdown.

Evolution endowed us to be a little judgmental. It probably knew this, which is why we are the kind of people who jump to conclusions and coast on sense perceptions and fleeting impressions.

But lossy compression is not always good.

Sometimes you need to see the raw files to understand someone.

And that is probably more often the case with the people you love and the people closest to you.

We need to ingest the full raw data files of these people, because lossy compression leads to lossy understanding.

I think this is also why the word sonder resonates with me so much, and why I haven’t forgotten it unlike many of the other new words that I’ve been trying to learn.

It speaks to this inner desire in me: the desire not to forget that there is far more to people than the outer appearances on which we base our judgments and construct narratives about the people we come across.

Behind every person’s face lies an entire universe to which we are not privy. They’re all stumbling and struggling through their lives, trying to deal with all their hopes, anxieties, fears and countless other emotions for which there probably aren’t good words in the English language.

Every person is dense and fibrous in that sense.

Nobody is simple.

And I’m pretty sure nobody has a simple life either.

There is another side to this realisation.

Most people we bump into in the course of life barely register or leave a mark. We tend to forget them because we are all stuck in our own heads.

I mean, I don’t know about you, but at least I am.

We are all stuck in our heads, making up stories, writing autobiographies, writing this continuous, never-ending autobiography of our lives, and constantly authoring things about who we are, what we need to do, why we do the things that we do, where we have to go, and everything else on the fly.

Once you appreciate the meaning of the word sonder, I think we shrink a little in our own heads.

We become a much smaller part of the picture because everybody else is preoccupied with navigating their own rich, vivid, complex, messy, dark, wonderful, delightful and thorny universes.

They don’t have time to think about us.

It’s a little similar to the spotlight effect. We often think that we are the centre of the world when, in reality, nobody gives a shit because they’re all busy with their own shit.

Now, sondering doesn’t necessarily turn you into one of those clichéd people who suddenly decides that life is beautiful, everybody is complex and therefore we should all be kind and understanding.

I don’t know.

It’s still entirely possible to sonder and be a murderous sociopath.

And strangely, the fact that even a murderous sociopath can sonder gives me some hope.

Not because I want more murderous sociopaths, obviously. But wouldn’t you rather have a sondering murderous sociopath who is aware that other people have rich, vivid inner lives than an unsondering, sonder-ignorant murderous sociopath?

Sorry for the stupid and juvenile digression.

But that’s probably the point I’m trying to get at.

Realising that other people have their own rich universes doesn’t magically make you good. It doesn’t necessarily make you kinder, wiser or more understanding.

At the bare minimum, it helps you see people differently.

And isn’t that enough?