Sometimes, you stare at a dog, and there is a part of you that feels like, “eh, OK.” But there’s another part that’s curious, like “sonder” (knowing that other people have lives of their own) curious. You want to go out and about and say, “Heeyyyya! It’s a me! I’m so excited and just right on about to go and do stuff!” And those feelings intersect, and you get this moment where you’re both excited and curious about the world around you, about the idea of “lives-of-their-own”, about the idea that you are not the center of the world. We know that intellectually, but emotionally, we are affected when shit hits the fan. That does not contradict the intellectual part. It merely shows that we are still human at the end of the day, in the middle of the day, at the start of the day when you clock in (‘less ur a night shifter), and every single time you feel the weight of death creepy-crawlying its way into ur entire sphincter. What I’m saying is that we are always more than ourselves, and that hits us everyday when we feel both the effects of a year-long sleep deprivation and know from a look at the bus and the urban world just how null and void life can be for any singular human-body. But no, I am talking about sonder. That is not just intellectual. Like I said, it’s curious. It’s excited because you need to care about it enough to be riled up about it. So when you do have a moment of sonder, that thing that we all know so well like deja vu, yes, we do wonder what it is in relation to everything that it could be and that it isn’t and that it happens to be in the same place as. That is sonder. We think of the entirety of a person and make up narratives, and immediately, there is this whole thing that we’ve packaged. And it sounds so great and so awesome.
That is “complicate”. We don’t make the world “complicated”. We merely are, but we can only muster so much for our sleep-deprived brains to process. More often than not, people don’t regain their previous capabilities for curiousity and excitement both at the same time in the form of childlike wonder. Life is a piece of shit.