On the first day of fall break, I was driving home on the interstate with nothing on my mind but sleeping in my own bed. Somewhere past the halfway point, a beat-up silver sedan pulled up alongside me. The driver, an older man, was singing along to something with his whole chest. A child’s car seat sat in the back. A few miles later he took an exit and was gone. I’ll never know his name, but for a second it hit me: someone was waiting for him. He had a favorite song, a worst memory, a joke only his brother understands. His life was just as real and complicated as mine, and I’d seen about three miles of it.
There’s a word for that feeling: sonder. Writer John Koenig coined it in “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” to describe the realization that every passerby lives a life as vivid as your own, one in which you’re just an extra in the background.
Koenig filed it under “sorrows,” and plenty of people agree. If eight billion stories are happening at once and I’m a blurry face in nearly all of them, what makes mine special? I think that reading is wrong. Sonder only stings because we’ve quietly assumed we were supposed to be the main character. Drop that assumption and what’s left isn’t despair. It’s wonder.
I’m a Christian, and my faith is why I see it that way. Feeling small and being insignificant are not the same thing. David looked up at the night sky and asked, “what is mankind that you are mindful of them?” (Psalm 8:4). In the next breath he marvels that God has “crowned them with glory and honor” (Psalm 8:5). If every person carries God’s image, as I believe they do, then sonder doesn’t shrink anyone. It shows that significance is everywhere.
But you don’t have to share my faith to see it. In his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, novelist David Foster Wallace described standing in a packed grocery store checkout line after a long day, irritated at everyone around him. His point was that we have a choice. Our default setting treats every stranger as an obstacle. But we can choose to imagine that the woman snapping at her child might have spent the last three nights at her dying husband’s bedside. How we see strangers is a decision, Wallace argued, and the lazy decision makes us miserable.
I see it in sports too. The golfer I’m paired with in a tournament isn’t just a number on a leaderboard. He might be fighting for the last spot in his team’s lineup, or playing in front of a grandfather who drove for hours to watch him. The ref who blows a call at a Wabash game goes home to a family that asks him how his night went. The opposing walk-on who never gets off the bench still shows up to every practice, and nobody in the stands knows why.
The real problem is pride, and it’s ours. Pride rarely sounds arrogant. Mostly, it’s just the quiet belief that my stress, my schedule and my reputation matter more than whatever the person next to me is carrying. We walk across campus with headphones on and eyes on our phones, treating everyone else as scenery. On a campus this small, it’s easy to convince ourselves we already know everyone’s story. We don’t.
This is where sonder stops being a feeling and becomes an obligation. Jesus said the second greatest commandment is to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31). When pressed on who counts as a neighbour, he told the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37). A man lies beaten by the road. Two respected religious men walk right past him. The one who stops is a stranger who doesn’t know the man’s name or how he got there. He doesn’t need to. He sees a life that matters, and he acts.
Most of us fall well short of that standard. We wait to hear someone’s story before deciding whether they deserve our patience. That gets it backwards. The cashier who seems short with me might be working her third double this week, or she might just be having an ordinary day. It doesn’t matter. Her life is real, so she’s owed the same kindness I’d want.
For me, that conviction comes from God. For you, it might come from your upbringing, your conscience or just the plain experience of being human. Wherever it comes from, it should cost you something. Sonder isn’t a pretty word for an Instagram caption. It’s a demand to treat every stranger as someone whose life is worth exactly as much as yours.
So here’s my challenge this week, whatever you believe. Take the headphones out. Notice one stranger and remember that their life is as real as yours. Then act on it. Hold the door, learn a name, say thank you and mean it.
We are small, and that’s not a tragedy. It’s an invitation, and we have no excuse to ignore it.