sonder
noun
the awareness that other people all have their own complex set of feelings and experiences
What does sonder mean?
Sonder may be defined as “the awareness that other people all have their own complex set of feelings and experiences.”
How is sonder used?
As an executive coach, I spend many hours with executives addressing issues of strategy, organizational challenges, and professional and even personal development. A profound, but often overlooked, or unknown, concept is that of sonder: the realization that each person has a life as rich and complex as our own.
—CE Noticias Financieras (Miami, FL), 22 Nov. 2024
Ada Limón's book of poetry, The Carrying, can be read as a meditation on the everyday experiences that inspire feelings of sonder. She pulls on the mundane strings of life, willing them to expose the complexity and imperfections of our day-to-day experiences, from a trip to the post office to an afternoon at the derby.
—Everyone is still as the rest of the song unravels the sentiments so easily evaded within ourselves. It’s moments like these when a concertgoer feels the most individual, yet traversing sonder because the strangers around you felt the same emotion at the same time.
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Where does sonder come from?
Sonder was coined by writer John Koenig around 2012, in his blog The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (published as a print book in 2021). Koenig defines the word as "the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”
How is sonder used?
Sonder is often used in reference to Koenig’s book, or as an example of an interesting word, which is unsurprising since it is recently invented. It should be noted that there is no rule governing how words are, or should be, made; a number of words (such as scofflaw, serendipity, chortle, and many others) that now are part of our language were simply invented by someone at some point.
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