Why this word is great
VICARITY — [Noun] The quality of understanding or experiencing something vicariously. From New Latin vicārietās ("vicariousness"), derived from vicarius ("substitute, proxy") + -ity (suffix forming abstract nouns). Unlike "empathy" (which involves directly sharing another's feelings) or "precarity" (which denotes instability), vicarity is the act of living through another’s skin—secondhand, at a remove. It is the warmth of a love story read alone in bed, the phantom adrenaline of a climber’s triumph watched from a couch, or the borrowed grief of a stranger’s funeral glimpsed through a window. To know vicarity is to recognize how much of life is not lived but borrowed, how often we are not the protagonists but the audience.