monachopsis

What it means

Three months into a new job you still do not know which mugs belong to whom. The others laugh at a story from a Christmas party you were not at. Nobody is unkind, and you have been invited to lunch twice. You still move through the kitchen as if it were somebody else’s house. That is monachopsis.

What separates it from an ordinary awkward moment is duration. It is a background condition, not an event: it can last a semester, a posting abroad, a decade in a town you moved to for work. It does not need hostility from anyone. It needs a mismatch between you and the place, a body or a habit that the room was not built for, the way a left-handed person feels about scissors. It can sit alongside real affection for the people around you. It usually ends gradually, when you stop noticing the doors, or suddenly, when you leave and the next place fits.

Where it comes from

John Koenig posted monachopsis to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows on Tumblr; the post is dated 25 November 2012, and the Internet Archive first captured it on 2 December 2012. It has drawn more than 14,000 notes. The book from Simon & Schuster (2021) prints it on page 124, in the section “Faces in a Crowd”.

Koenig’s own etymology joins Ancient Greek monakhós, “single, solitary”, to ópsis, “vision”. The word is a view from solitude: seeing a place as the one person in it who does not quite fit. Koenig gives the pronunciation as “mon-uh-kop-sis”, with the stress on the third syllable. Wiktionary records the same two roots and cites uses of the word in books from 2019 onward.

How to use it

Two years in Lisbon and the monachopsis has mostly worn off, except at the bank. Casual; used like the name of a chronic, mild condition.

The novel is a long study in monachopsis: a farm boy at a boarding school, correct in every detail and wrong in all of them. Literary; a reviewer’s label for a character’s state.

What it is not

Imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is a belief about merit: that you have not earned your place and will be found out. It lives in offices, labs and lecture halls and is about performance. Monachopsis makes no claim about merit at all. A person can be the best surgeon on the ward and still feel like the wrong species in its staffroom.

Loneliness. Loneliness is the lack of connection, and it can strike in your own family home. Monachopsis can coexist with friends, invitations and a full calendar. The lonely person wants more people. The person with monachopsis has people and wants a place that fits, which is why it often eases with a move rather than with company.

In the wild

• Arctor, Monachopsis EP (Coincidence Records, 2017). A vinyl-only techno release of 150 copies, issued 21 July 2017, with a title track and a remix by Advanced Human.
• CJ Parker, Monachopsis (2018). A six-song alternative EP released 15 December 2018.