by Haley Mitchell, staff reporter

On any given Saturday night you’re likely to find me at home, sitting in the darkness of my teenage cave, going through my Tumblr feed on endless scroll mode. I’m neither antisocial nor introverted. I just like Tumblr. While parents like to blame online communities as another outlet for procrastination (they’re half right), I prefer to think of them as platforms to make new discoveries. The Internet recently led me to the photoblog “Humans of New York.” I’m so glad I stumbled onto it because quite honestly, it changed the way I look at a lot of things.

My most immediate response to obsessively looking through the portraits of Humans of New York was sonder. Sonder is (in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows) “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” HONY, as the photo blog has affectionately been dubbed by fans, really brought that to my attention. Maybe this makes me ignorant or selfish, but up until I read through a good two months’ worth of photographs on the Humans of New York website, I hadn’t given much thought to the fact that maybe every other person on this planet has thoughts just as complicated and distinctive as mine.

Photographer Brandon Stanton operates HONY by taking portraits of strangers throughout New York and then conducting a short interview with his subject. This ritual generates a variety of responses ranging from entertaining catchphrases to snippets of life stories, and since every individual generates a different answer, each caption is unique to a subject. Without their captions, Stanton’s photos would be just be silent, still pictures of everyday New Yorkers, leaving us to contemplate what they could be feeling or doing. Yet once we hear what these New Yorkers have to say, the photos suddenly have a new depth.

Besides verbal masterpieces and flamboyant images, HONY provides us with a real perspective of what the majority of New Yorkers—and all people, really—are like, as opposed to the negative characters portrayed in the media. Watching Brandon Stanton’s TED talk confirmed my theory: Stanton has taken pictures all over New York—even in the supposed “bad” neighborhoods–and he’s realized that the majority of the residents are friendly and open. Stanton recognized that the media exists to tell us a good story, and the stories they usually tell us represent the most extreme elements of our society. While this is effective for getting people to watch the news, it has also created a false idea of what the world is like. What Stanton tries to convey is that the world inside the TV screen is much wilder than the world we live in, which is a truth we forget quite often.

HONY also adds a little brightness to my day-to-day life. Suddenly, the little family sitting on a bench at the mall was part of a picturesque scene. Suddenly, when someone asked me how my day was and I replied with “Great, how was yours?” I was genuinely interested in talking to them. Seeing the beauty of people captured in a collection of pixels has brought out the beauty around me, and that has made all the difference.

If you’re anything like me, a good dose of empathy and appreciation could be just what you need, and HONY supplies more than enough inspiration for that. I’m not saying Humans of New York is for everyone, but for priceless personal philosophies you may or may not agree with, the kind of heartwarming cuteness that can only come from adorable children you’ve never met, tidbits of knowledge presented by a vast diversity of characters, and so much more, it’s worth reading.