sonder
n.
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.