There’s a word for it — sonder, coined by a guy who runs a dictionary of obscure emotions — that describes the realization that every passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own. It went briefly viral a few years ago, got printed on posters, became a thing people said to sound deep at parties. Which is a shame because underneath the overexposure is something that’s actually worth sitting with if you let it land properly instead of just nodding at it.
The person you walked past this morning on the way to wherever you were going has a mother, probably. Has a thing they’re worried about right now that has nothing to do with you and that they’ve been carrying for weeks. Has a memory of a summer that was the best summer, a song that belongs to a specific year, a word they always misspell, a joke they find funnier than anyone else does. Has an entire interior architecture that took decades to build and that you passed in about two seconds and will never think about again.
You are also that person to them. You flickered past in their peripheral vision while they were thinking about something else entirely and you were, for a half second, just a shape moving through their day. All the things that make you specifically you — everything you’ve been through, everything you know, everyone you love — none of it registered. You were just part of the background of a Tuesday they’ll forget by Thursday.
I find this more comforting than distressing, most days. The world is so much fuller than it looks from the inside of your own head. Every street is packed with entire novels of experience, walking around in regular clothes, getting coffee, checking their phones, waiting for the light to change. The density of it is genuinely staggering if you let yourself actually feel it rather than just know it intellectually.
Someone walked past me today outside a sandwich place and made brief eye contact and we both did that neutral almost-nod that strangers do, and then they were gone. They had somewhere to be. So did I. For one second we were in the same frame and then we weren’t and the whole rest of each other’s lives remains completely private. I hope theirs is going well. There’s no reason it would be. There’s no reason it wouldn’t. I’ll never know and somehow that’s okay.