"Sonder" Revelations

How I Learned that Everyone Else Is Human, Too

When I was a child of about six, I was on a bus with my mother, watching passengers sit, stand, and get on and off. All of a sudden I was struck by the realization that each person I was looking at had a personality, a brain, an entire life behind their face. Each was as full and genuine a person as I.

I’ve never forgotten that moment — but now I have a word for it, “sonder.” I learned the word from Kaveh Akbar’s interesting novel, Martyr!, in which his sef-involved protagonist defines it as the “realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”

“Sonder” did not exist as a word when I had my revelation on the bus; it was invented only recently, by John Koenig, author of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, published in 2021, which offers neologisms for emotions that are not yet described in the English language. In Martyr!, it is Koenig’s unnamed website that provides Akbar’s character with the above definition.

Although it is a noun, sonder was inspired, so I have read, by the German adjective “sonder” (special) and the French verb sonder (to probe). I might add “sound out” as a related English expression. (“Sound out Martha about the idea, see how she feels.”) Etymology aside, however, “sonder” is most valuable as the antonym of such words as “dehumanization” and “othering” — words that expedite hatred and violence. The experience of sonder is an experience of rehumanization and social-ism (hyphen intended). We desperately need to cultivate it. Indeed, my persistent memory of riding the bus and recognizing strangers as human beings has, throughout my life, been an antidote to the poisons of alienation and objectification that pollute so much of human experience. Sonder versus dehumanization, sonderism vs. fascism: It’s the political struggle of our day.

There were several other memorable “sonder moments” in the course of my childhood that also served to awaken me. One was a pre-school episode, when my mother and I bumped into my older brother’s second-grade teacher on the street in our neighborhood. When my mom was done talking with her and I asked, “Who was that?” and learned that she was Rusty’s teacher, I said, “Really? I didn’t know they came out.” And while my mother was laughing, my brain lit up with realizations about people, and work, and neighborhood . . .

Another sonder moment was my first glimpse, at age 8 or so, of a woman’s breasts — a friend of my parents, who was changing into a bathing suit — which somehow led me to think, Women are basically people, people with breasts. As a horny heterosexual man, I’ve had to expand upon that revelation — people first, sex objects second — over and over again through the years. Forgive me for this, but in the culture in which we all live, it’s kind of like hacking your way through a jungle with a butter knife.

In recent years, my sense of sonder has pushed outwards, beyond human beings, to embrace, basically, all living things — this thanks to the revelations of contemporary science, and to my having lived for more than forty years in the country. Once you start realizing that the groundhog who’s scampering across the road is the same one you saw last week, and that the heron flying overhead is a neighbor, not just a random bird — in other words, that you are living within the territory claimed by many other individual creatures, who are eyeing you just as much as you’re eyeing them — your sense of who is a conscious, sentient being greatly expands.

What about you? I’d love to hear about your “sonder moments.” It’s time to pay attention to them!