Blog / 2025 / Sonder

“Sonder” is a noun or verb, and it refers the feeling you get when you realize that every other person on the planet is living a life that’s as full and complex as yours.

I only recently came across “sonder” in Kaveh Akbar’s excellent novel Martyr! but the etymology traces back to 2012 and John Koenig’s blog The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It’s inspired by the French verb “sonder,” meaning to probe or plumb the depths.

If I had to name just one inspiration for my art, it could be most handily summed up in this word.

I paint lots of things now—animals and landscapes and surreal stories—but, for the first six years of my career, I painted people exclusively, and portraits are still very important to me. While I’ll occasionally paint a famous person or a fictional one, my portraits are most often of people I’ve met and interviewed myself, including Shimoda.

It’s my sondering spirit that makes me want to focus on painting people who are in my life IRL, and I’m glad to be guided by this aspect of my personality.

I’m such a fan of sondering that I can’t help but think that we’d be better off if more people engaged in this way of thinking on a regular basis. Imagine a world where each of us acknowledged that we can’t ever truly understand what’s going on in anyone else’s mind but we can still remain curious about their experiences!

The fact that a word to describe this way of being didn’t exist until recently reveals everything about who humans have been until this moment. That said, it does make me hopeful. Maybe now that we have the language for recognizing the complexity of others we’ll finally start recognizing it more often.

“Sonder” isn’t the only neologism that’s made me feel seen. A few years ago, it was “solastalgia.”