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Comment by ljf | Hacker News Reader

Similar, but different - I am sometimes totally overcome with sonder, especially when passing a large residential building or flying over a city.

/Noun. sonder (uncountable) (neologism) The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one's own, which they are constantly living despite one's personal lack of awareness of it./

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Same here. Perhaps the craziest bit is all the microinteractions that we have. For example, you and I may never interact other than in this one comment thread.

Oof, yep. Look at a stop sign. And think about all the lives of all the people through all the decades that sign has been standing there.

Each person connected to everyone else in a web of history.

Every single living being having a unique experience, every second of every day. Every inanimate object having a history that might span back through to the beginning of time. Lonely rocks floating through space for longer than we can even fathom.

Sonder is a wonderful feeling.

From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, by John Koenig.

https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/23536922667/...

It's listed in dictionary.com, but it's not in Merriam-Webster or Cambridge dictionaries yet.

Great word. When flying over a foreign country I like to look out the plane window at people driving on remote roads and wonder what they're like and what stories they have. Didn't realize there was a word for that.

It's a word made up by tumblr-ists though...

Made up just like every other word.

So am I. In fact, I remember exactly when it started. Never knew that there was a word for it, though.

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