The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Sonder

I was driving my car on I95 a few months ago when I had a very random thought. I was stuck in traffic and it was backed up to the point that we were completely still. The thought suddenly hit me that everyone in those cars is at a different stage in their lives, yet we all intersected at the same point at the same exact time. We probably will never interact with these people or even see them again, but life brought us together at this very moment at this specific time. This idea might seem silly or weird or random but it is very interesting when you think about it. Every single person in their car has a life as crazy and random as mine. Going through their own emotions, chasing their own dreams, fighting through their own hardships, etc. To me, they were just random passersby that I would never think about, but I was that to them as well.

I thought about this for a few days, about how connected the world really is. There could have been someone who was born on the other side of the world and is now at the grocery store at the same time as me. Even with us being thousands of miles apart from each other at one point in our lives, we somehow would end up coming in contact years, even decades, later. It’s like everything in our lives happened and lead to this moment. Just as we may think of ourselves as the “main character”, so does everyone else. This idea makes everyday interactions have more purpose. If we can have a positive interaction with anyone, this can create a wave of goodness, for lack of a better phrase. This makes it seem like we have a bigger impact than we might, which I don’t see a problem with. With the current state of the world and suicide rates skyrocketing since the start of the pandemic, anything that gives us a greater feeling of having a positive impact on others is a win in my book. Especially considering the fact that helping others does wonders for one’s own mental health.

Society in the 21st century can feel very isolated at times, especially living in suburban America. I’ve been going on walks and jogs at Glasgow Park, which is a park nearby with a trail over 2 miles. It is here where I’ve been thinking about this a lot, where I see many older people going on walks with other people, likely catching up with friends. In a city where everything is spread out like most suburbs are, isolation is even more prevalent. This is where I thought about that feeling once again, the fact that everyone is living their own complex lives.

Eventually, I looked into this idea and found “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows”. This is a book written by John Koenig, who also has a website and youtube channel revolving around it. This book is made up of many different terms and ideas that don’t really have an official word to identify them. I became obsessed with all the different words and quickly realized that I could relate to most of them. The word ‘sonder’ is the term used to describe what I have been talking about. The book defines sonder as “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.” This definition has stuck with me for a few months and led to me eventually writing this.

I think one of the biggest reasons why the term ‘sonder’ has been going through my mind for a while is because of my interest in photography. The ability to capture a moment and have it live on forever is so fascinating to me. My favorite style of photography is easily street photography, which includes people and their interactions to their environment, mostly in the city. This is connected to sonder in that the camera is capturing a certain place at a certain time and I can go back and look at it at any point forever. I will probably never interact with two people in the background of a photo I take, yet they happened to be at the exact point that my camera was pointed at when I snapped a photo. As French photographer Elliott Erwitt said:

“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place…I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”

When I went to New York City, my family and I were taking the ferry from Manhattan to Staten Island to pick up the car and head back home to Delaware. I was waiting for the perfect shot with the sun shining on the ocean. I’m pretty sure anyone who follows my instagram can tell how much I love those kind of photos. The clouds ended up blocking the sun and I wasn’t able to get the shot I wanted. I was bummed out at this as I took a seat on one of the benches on the ferry. I took out my camera and looked in the viewfinder where there was a family looking out the window at the ocean. They were laughing and taking a selfie and just living life in the moment enjoying each other’s presence. I snapped a photo and this ended up becoming one of my favorite pictures. This photo has now become a memory that takes me back to that specific moment. I may never find that family again, in fact there is probably a 99.9 repeated chance that I will see them again in my life. And yet, life led me to that very moment where they were standing in front of me with my camera. And that moment will now live on forever through photography.

‘Sonder’ has really made me think about the importance of realizing and looking at the humanity of people. Everyone is unique in their own ways and is living their own life with their own hardships and struggles. Each and every one of us are struggling and if you look at people in this light, I think everyone would be a lot more empathetic. This is definitely something the world could use in its current state, and it can go a long way in making our world a better place. All the photos I have used in this piece were shot by me and show people living their everyday life and made me think about the term ‘sonder’.