Sonder; Everyone Has A Story

An important and beautiful lesson to learn and to teach, the concept of sonder is a fantastic antidote to the fetishization of individual stories and personalities. Learning that every random passer-by is living a life as vivid and complex as your own, is crucial to being able to identify equality of opportunity and practice a practical empathy.

Sonder is a concept that informs all the work that we do at the Just Be Nice Project. We believe it should inform yours.

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.

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