In 2020 I wrote about sonder and I believe now is the right time to re-think that word. To remember that each person on this planet is living a life that’s deeply rich, anxious, beautiful, creative, and complicated as the one you and I live. And that, for however many billion of people there are on this planet, each individual personal story is just as uniquely complex. With billions of layers of complexity, it’s hard to distill the simple truths from it. What’s true for one may be false for another?

Sonder gives us a framework for seeing through the complexity. Sonder gives us the idea that the complexity is the simple truth. And if you adopt the idea of sonder, then it’s helpful to also adopt the tools of curiosity and skepticisms to help you learn the beautiful, anxious, and complex stories we all hold. You might find yourself taking less of a “this is what I believe” position about the world and more of a “here’s what I’ve heard, it’s interesting, I’d like to learn more” position.

And, anti-sonderites might think I’m not being much of the realist that I purport to be. I disagree. Sonder is ultra-realist. Sonder invites me to see the world as it is — beautiful, anxious, vivid, and complicated. And sonder requires me to engage in that world with curiosity and skepticism in order to understand it.

Without sonder, you might be gaslighting yourself into a view of the world that’s not quite real, but “real enough” to be falsely-believable. And, I fear that doesn’t serve you as much as it might serve the system that benefits from its people not seeing.

Conspiracy theorists can spin up blogs to speculate who might want us to be blind and not curious. That’s not for me. I claim something more directly — that the cognitive costs of deploying sonder is so great and the returns to developing certainty about the world are so small, that it’s more efficient to pick a side and feel more certain.

The tradeoff:

The expected value from spending more time and energy realizing how complex the world and its narratives are and the effect on my uncertainty is so low, that it it’s better to allocate my resources behind theories that appear more certain.

For those that prefer that model, that’s fine. What those people prefer is perfect, and it’s my heartfelt and benevolent hope that it leads to maximum life fulfillment for them.

For me, it’s not enough. I derive the greatest fulfillment realizing that nothing is as it seems and that the journey to understanding returns the greatest joy than the certainty that I have it all figured out.

Said another way: $$\text{Human Nature} = \frac{Logic}{\sqrt{-1}}$$

Last modified on 2026-02-02