“the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own”
John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, 2021
Sonder can catch you in the most ordinary places. Sitting in traffic. Waiting in line for coffee. Looking out at the windows of an apartment building after dark.
There’s nothing particularly remarkable about any of these moments, until you consider how little you know about the people around you. The person in the next car might be heading home after a terrible day. Someone across the street could be on their way to meet a friend they haven’t seen in years. You’ll probably never find out.
Their lives continue regardless of whether you notice them.
That’s the idea behind sonder, a word coined by John Koenig around 2012 for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It describes the sudden awareness that everyone around us has a life as complicated and meaningful to them as ours is to us.
It’s an appealing thought. But there’s a question worth exploring beneath it: does recognizing the complexity of other people’s lives make us any better at understanding them?
Psychological research suggests we need to distinguish between recognizing that someone has an inner world and accurately understanding what goes on inside it.
Sonder Meaning: Where the Word Came From
It’s easy to assume a word that names such a familiar feeling must have been around for centuries. Sonder hasn’t. Koenig invented it for a project that gave names to experiences people recognized but struggled to describe. Merriam-Webster’s slang dictionary traces the coinage to around 2012, and Dictionary.com records the same year.
Online, you’ll sometimes see sonder described as an old philosophical expression borrowed from another language. That makes for an appealing backstory, but it isn’t true. It’s a modern English word, deliberately invented.
Whether a word is old or new tells us little about its usefulness. People keep using words when those words help them communicate something they couldn’t easily say before.
That’s what makes sonder meaning interesting. It gives a recognizable shift in perspective a name. There’s a loose parallel with fika, a word shaped by cultural history that also captures something larger than its literal definition. Sonder arrived by a different route, but both show how much meaning a short expression can carry.
Why Sonder Meaning Feels So Profound
Think about the amount of context you carry into even a minor decision. Maybe you’re distracted because of a conversation from yesterday. A song reminds you of somebody you miss. Your mood has more to do with something happening at home than with the person standing in front of you.
To everyone else, most of that remains invisible. They might see your expression or hear a sentence, but they don’t get the long explanation behind it. And you’re in exactly the same position when you look at them.
Psychologists call the process of reasoning about another person’s beliefs, feelings, and intentions mentalizing. A 2024 review in Nature Reviews Psychology describes how strongly our own perspective can influence that process. Even when we understand that someone thinks differently, our assumptions can still shape what we imagine they’re thinking.
Sonder doesn’t fix that problem. It doesn’t reveal what anyone is actually thinking. It changes the question from what you think you know about someone to what you might be missing.
That can feel surprisingly disorienting. The street is still the same street, but suddenly it isn’t populated by extras in your day. Every person is occupied with a life in which you may have no role at all.
Sonder Meaning in Psychology: Not the Same as Empathy
It’s tempting to call this empathy, although the two aren’t quite the same thing.
Sonder is an awareness of complexity. You recognize that someone else has an inner life, without necessarily knowing what they’re feeling. Empathy involves understanding, sharing, or responding to another person’s emotions. Perspective-taking is an attempt to see a situation from their point of view. Mentalizing is the broader process of reasoning about another mind.
These abilities overlap, but they shouldn’t be treated as interchangeable. A review of behavioral and neuroscience research distinguishes emotional empathy from cognitive perspective-taking and cautions against treating them as one undifferentiated process.
You might experience sonder on a crowded train, looking around at people whose names you’ll never learn. You can recognize that every passenger has worries, relationships, and plans without sharing their emotions or knowing what they’re going through.
There’s no need to fill in those blanks. The blanks are part of the point.
The Psychological Trap Inside Sonder Meaning
There’s a catch to all this. Once you start paying attention to other people’s hidden lives, it’s easy to let your imagination run ahead of what you actually know.
Suppose someone passes you without saying hello. You might decide they’re unfriendly, or perhaps invent a sympathetic explanation for their behavior. Either way, you’re telling yourself a story from very little information.
Researchers have studied a related problem they call perspective mistaking. In a series of experiments, participants tried to work out what other people were thinking and feeling. Instructions to take another person’s perspective did not reliably make those judgments more accurate. Sometimes participants became more confident, even when their accuracy didn’t improve. Getting information directly from the other person worked better than imagining their perspective alone.
That gives us a useful limit to the idea of sonder: recognizing that someone has a complex life is not the same as knowing what that life contains.
The stranger who looks angry might indeed be angry. They might be tired, worried about a family member, or thinking about something entirely unrelated to you. There’s no way to know from a passing glance. Sonder is most useful when it makes us less certain about our guesses, not more inventive with them.
What Happens When We Actually Talk to Strangers?
One way to get beyond those guesses is surprisingly ordinary: talk to someone.
Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar, and Nicholas Epley studied what happened when people had deeper conversations with others they didn’t know well. Beforehand, participants expected the interactions to feel awkward and less enjoyable than they actually turned out to be. Afterward, they reported more connection and happiness than they’d anticipated. The work appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Another research team looked across seven studies involving 2,304 participants. Their mini meta-analysis found a similar mismatch: people generally feared conversations with strangers more than their actual experiences seemed to warrant.
Neither study tested whether experiencing sonder caused those outcomes. Sonder isn’t an established clinical or psychological construct with a validated scale and demonstrated causal effect. It would be a mistake to present these findings as proof that sonder makes people happier.
What the findings offer is a more modest insight. We can underestimate the possibilities of a conversation before it even begins, partly because there’s so much about the other person we haven’t discovered.
Why We Reduce Other People to Roles
Consider how many people you encounter in an ordinary week. The driver in front of you, someone making your coffee, a coworker from another department, a stranger occupying the seat beside you. Most pass through your day without leaving much of an impression.
That’s hardly surprising. You couldn’t reconstruct every person’s biography even if you wanted to. Attention is limited, and everyday life requires shortcuts.
So a person becomes the driver holding up traffic, the cashier taking too long, the difficult customer, or the passenger in seat 12A. These labels tell us something about an encounter. They tell us very little about the individual.
Every now and then, something breaks through that shorthand. Maybe you overhear a stranger telling a friend good news. Or you notice someone quietly collecting themselves before going into a building. The person who had been part of the scenery is suddenly recognizable as a person with a whole day, and a whole life, beyond this moment.
Sonder doesn’t mean we have to stay in that frame of mind all the time. It simply gives us a reason to remember that our shorthand is incomplete.
Does Perspective-Taking Actually Make Us Less Self-Centered?
It’s reasonable to wonder whether these moments of awareness make us less self-centered. The research gives a qualified answer.
People often rely on their own knowledge when judging another person’s perspective, a tendency psychologists call egocentric bias. In a 2020 experiment, explicitly considering someone else’s experience reduced that bias under certain conditions.
But perspective-taking doesn’t work equally well in every situation. If we lack information about a person, imagining their viewpoint can still lead us astray. Some research also suggests that in competitive settings, trying to infer another person’s motives can encourage suspicion and even more self-interested behavior.
That leaves room for a version of sonder that’s less ambitious, and probably more useful, than trying to imagine exactly what everyone else feels. You can notice that your first interpretation is incomplete without claiming to know what belongs in the gaps.
The Sapien Interpretation: Sonder Is an Exercise in Epistemic Humility
There’s something humbling about the gap between what you know about your own life and what you know about somebody else’s.
You can explain why a seemingly minor event mattered to you. You remember what led up to it, what it brought back, and what it changed afterward. A stranger sees only the event itself, if they notice it at all. From their side, your behavior might look simple or even puzzling.
Now reverse the positions. That’s the gap we live with whenever we judge another person.
The part of sonder meaning that stays with me is this distinction: having no access to someone’s history doesn’t mean there’s no history there. It means I don’t have access to it. Philosophers call this kind of awareness epistemic humility, a willingness to recognize the limits of what we know.
There’s an important difference between that and sentimental storytelling. Seeing someone as fully human doesn’t require inventing their past, imagining their private struggles, or assuming you understand their motivations. It may require the opposite: resisting the urge to complete a story from a few visible details.
We’ve explored a related idea in Ubuntu philosophy, which considers how relationships shape personhood. Ubuntu asks what our connections with others make possible. Sonder draws attention to the many individual lives unfolding around us, whether or not we’re part of them.
Both ideas leave us with a bigger view of human life, but neither requires us to pretend we know more than we do.
A Better Way to Practice Sonder
You don’t need to romanticize strangers or turn every encounter into a philosophical exercise. If sonder is useful in daily life, it’s probably as a small correction to moments when our certainty gets ahead of our knowledge.
It might look like this:
- When someone irritates you, leave part of the explanation open. You may know what happened without knowing why they acted that way.
- When understanding matters, ask. A conversation can tell you more about a person’s perspective than a carefully imagined explanation.
- Occasionally notice the people outside your attention. A station platform, hospital corridor, or restaurant holds dozens of separate lives you usually have no reason to think about.
- Keep first impressions in proportion. Someone’s job, appearance, or behavior during a brief encounter is not their whole biography.
None of this requires abandoning judgment. Boundaries and quick decisions are sometimes necessary. Sonder isn’t a demand that we understand everyone, or an excuse to overlook harmful behavior. It’s a reminder to be careful about the parts of a story we fill in ourselves.
Is Sonder a Real Word?
Yes. It was invented recently, but that doesn’t disqualify it.
Koenig coined sonder in the twenty-first century, and the term gradually found an audience. It now appears in dictionaries, books, journalism, music, and everyday conversation. Its history is short, not imaginary.
Why did this particular word stick? We can’t know exactly. One plausible explanation is that people recognized the feeling before they had a convenient way to describe it. A word can give shape to an experience without having a centuries-old history behind it.
Is Sonder a Psychological Term?
Not as a formal, validated psychological construct.
Researchers study mentalizing, empathy, perspective-taking, egocentric bias, conversations with strangers, and many other processes that help us understand the experience sonder describes. But there isn’t an established body of research showing that sonder itself is a distinct, reliably measured psychological phenomenon.
So when someone claims that sonder increases empathy or makes people happier, the right question is whether a study actually tested that claim. Research on related topics can illuminate an idea without proving every benefit associated with the word.
Why a Made-Up Word Can Still Reveal Something Real
You probably had moments of sonder long before you heard the word. Maybe it happened while watching a crowd from a window, or sitting beside someone on a train and suddenly wondering where they were going. The experience didn’t need a name to occur.
But names can make experiences easier to notice and talk about. That’s one reason an invented word can become meaningful, even when it doesn’t describe a scientifically unique mental mechanism.
The idea behind sonder doesn’t need a grand conclusion. Most people we pass will remain strangers. We’ll know almost nothing about the conversations, losses, jokes, and ordinary routines that fill their days.
Those lives go on anyway.
Next read: Ubuntu Philosophy: What Does “I Am Because We Are” Mean? If sonder draws our attention to the lives we rarely see, Ubuntu offers another perspective on how our lives are connected.
References
- Koenig J. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Simon & Schuster; 2021. Original sonder coinage and definition.
- Merriam-Webster. Sonder: slang meaning and word history.
- Dictionary.com. Sonder definition and etymology.
- Todd AR, Tamir DI. Factors that amplify and attenuate egocentric mentalizing. Nature Reviews Psychology. 2024;3:164-180.
- Stietz J, Jauk E, Krach S, Kanske P. Dissociating empathy from perspective-taking. Frontiers in Psychiatry. 2019;10:126.
- Eyal T, Steffel M, Epley N. Perspective mistaking: Accurately understanding the mind of another requires getting perspective, not taking perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2018;114(4):547-571.
- Kardas M, Kumar A, Epley N. Overly shallow? Miscalibrated expectations create a barrier to deeper conversation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2022;122(3):367-398.
- Sandstrom GM, Boothby EJ. Why do people avoid talking to strangers? A mini meta-analysis of predicted fears and actual experiences talking to a stranger. Self and Identity. 2021;20(1):47-71.
- Samuel S, Frohnwieser A, Lurz R, Clayton NS. Reduced egocentric bias when perspective-taking compared with working from rules. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 2020;73(9):1368-1381.
- Featured photograph: Jacek Dylag on Unsplash.
