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. (from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)

***

Airports always make me feel very small.

Once I fight my way past the ticket counter and TSA and the Starbucks line, I make it to my gate and collapse into a plastic chair that is comfortable but not too comfortable. While I sip my coffee, I people-watch. I finally land on surreptitiously observing the older woman across from me wearing a wraparound shawl and ankle boots, reading a book that makes her laugh every once in a while. Before long, I get lost in the idea that her life is just as complex and full as mine. She has her own worries, drama, inner life. What are her hopes and dreams? What keeps her up at night? Is she traveling to see family that love her just as fiercely as my family loves me?

She might be returning to Australia or Timbuktu to never travel to the States again. This singular moment–her reading her book, me watching her read her book–might be the only time that our lives intersect.

Then, I start to notice all of the people coming and going, working, eating, or sleeping around me. I am stunned by the humanity, the truth that every single one of these people lives as full a life as I do. A life that I know absolutely nothing about.

I think of all the tears and the laughs, the worries, the sighs, the heartbreaks and successes, that are represented at that moment at that gate at that airport. I am overwhelmed in a way that makes me feel small and fragile, but also distinctly human. The delicate threads of our lives intersect and diverge, like a massive, complicated spider web, a web that I am a very small part of.

I’ve been thinking about NPCs lately. NPC is a videogame term that stands for Nonplayer Character. It references the background characters in videogames that exist only to move the players along, like the store clerk that steps forward to answer a question and then steps back to wait until the next player comes along. He has no inner life, no backstory, no function beyond providing a little bit of programmed information to the players on their way complete the game.

With both globalization and the explosion of the internet, I worry about the NPC-ification of our society. It feels like everywhere we turn, we are being pushed to consider other people as a tool, rather than a full person. We buy too much shit that we don’t need, made by people on the other side of the world. To us, they are nameless and faceless cogs of the global economy, but, of course, they have a face and a name. People that love them. Hopes and dreams.

Everywhere I go, someone wants my email, my zip code, my phone number. Sometimes the grocery store feels like a laser tag maze as I dodge and swerve to avoid pushy salespeople trying to get me to switch internet service providers or give their shady nonprofit a donation. I feel as if I am only a data point, a dollar sign, one blip in an endless sea of data. I only exist for corporations to exploit and use in their quest for more money, more market share.

On social media, we watch people for entertainment and then swipe them away, looking for our next dopamine hit, never wondering–or really caring–about the person in the video. It’s why the comment sections are such dumpster fires. Sometimes, I wonder what happens to those people on our screens, especially the ones that have had their worst day broadcast to the world. What happens to them after the worst day of their life has been turned into clickbait for entertainment?

Society’s NPC-ification is the clearest to me in politics. Most politicians, but especially the GOP, now do it. Trans people. Somali immigrants. Undocumented people. Venezuelans. Gazan children. These are not NPCs who exist only to serve as a mechanism to gain political power. They are people with pasts and futures. They are complicated, hopeful, beloved.

Just like me.

Just like you.

I can do better about swimming upstream, against the currents pulling us toward NPC-ification. I can curb my voracious consumption. I can question and resist narratives that turn whole people into political pawns. I can refuse to engage with social media that exploits others, especially without their consent.

Mostly, I can remember that the fragile web of humanity exists everywhere around me. Everyone that I come into contact with today- the gas station clerk, the Wal-Mart cashier, the woman at the bus stop- has a life that is just as full and meaningful as mine.

There are no NPCs in real life.