Sometimes I like to imagine what other people’s lives are like. Not anyone I know, but complete strangers. It turns out someone has coined a term related to this.

noun. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own — populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness - an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.¹

I originally was going to write something about this, about some of my more memorable imaginings and how the concept of sonder, though perfectly reasonable, is one that our brains trick us into overlooking all the time. However, George Saunders does a pretty excellent job of covering these points in a recently published graduation speech he gave earlier this spring.² Go read it.