sonder
There is a word for this feeling, "sonder": the sudden awareness that every stranger is living a life as full as your own. I get it in two places. Looking into lit windows at night, and looking down from a plane.
These are not really the same experience. The window enlarges a life. You see a kitchen, a lamp, someone at a counter, and you fill in the rest. The plane shrinks lives. Every house becomes a dot, and the dots go on to the horizon. Yet both leave me with the same thought: my problems are small. That makes me suspicious. If two opposite views produce the same conclusion, maybe I'm bringing the conclusion with me.
The logic is odd when you say it out loud. My problems feel smaller because so many other people have problems too. But problems aren't diluted by being counted. My rent isn't lower because millions of others worry about rent. Honestly, the world contains more difficulty than I thought, not less.
So what actually shrinks? I think it's the feeling of being singled out. Part of what makes a problem heavy is the sense that it's happening specifically to me, that I'm the main character and the story has gone wrong. Eleven thousand lit windows on the approach into a city remove the main character. The problem stays the same size. It just stops being a verdict.
There's a catch. If distance makes my worries smaller, it should make my joys smaller too. But I've never looked down from a plane and thought, I suppose the people I love don't matter much either. The perspective works selectively. It lightens what I want lightened. That's convenient enough to make me think it isn't really a view of the world. It's a trick I do on myself, with the world as a prop.
That's probably fine. Most coping is a trick. But the plane view isn't more true than the view from my own kitchen. It's just a different distance, with its own distortions. From far enough away, nothing can be seen at all.
The window is the more honest one. It doesn't shrink anything. It says: here is one other person, and their evening is as full as yours. That doesn't make my problems smaller. It makes them ordinary. Small is a measurement. Ordinary is company. I'd rather have the second.
I still like looking down from planes. I'm just less sure what I'm seeing. Probably not a lesson about proportion. More likely two true facts sitting next to each other: there are a great many of us, and my own life is hard to feel from the outside. Whether one has anything to say about the other, I haven't decided.
