“Sonder” is a word in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, defined as “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” Beautiful/Anonymous, a podcast that first aired on March 15, 2016, captures this feeling well.
Beautiful/Anonymous is short for “Beautiful Stories from Anonymous People.” The premise of the show is that the host, Chris Gethard, takes a call from a random passerby — and he just has a conversation with them for a full hour. The only conditions are that Gethard cannot hang up, the caller stays anonymous, and the phone call ends after exactly one hour.
Anonymity is a beautiful thing. It allows every episode to be a visceral and genuine look into a person’s life, every episode to be a complex and unique story about one’s identity, their aspirations and accomplishments, their failures and mistakes.
Other interview based podcasts are structured around big names, with experienced interviewers talking to celebrities about their lives. But Beautiful/Anonymous features everyday people, making it a more mundane, improvised conversation, without any obligations or agenda.
Every story makes you feel personally connected to the caller, makes you empathize with their problems, and makes you want nothing more than for them to achieve their goals. Making this relationship between a listener and a random caller is no small feat, especially through only audio.
This is partly facilitated by the anonymity, making the caller tell their deepest secrets without fear of any consequences, but it’s also facilitated by the conversational skills of the host, Chris Gethard.
Gethard puts the caller at ease — as a comedian, he knows how to lighten up the conversation, making it much friendlier than a show like Fresh Air. He also invests himself in the caller with deep, genuine curiosity, coaxing out personal details from seemingly simple facts.
In the episode “Passport, Exodus,” Gethard is able to turn the conversation from one about the unwieldy process of getting a passport to the extreme and intricate religious upbringing of the caller. In another, “The Cycle of Life,” the caller starts talking about whether or not she should get a 401k, but Gethard coaxes out her personal thoughts about death, bringing the caller to tears.
However, Gethard sometimes oversteps his role in the podcast — he interrupts callers often, cutting off the beginnings of stories that seem like they could be really interesting. Gethard’s curiosity can get the best of him, making him only look for stories that he thinks will be interesting, rather than a story that his audience, or the caller, thinks is interesting.
But this makes the podcast more human, more like an actual conversation — Gethard has no rules for himself (besides that he can’t hang up), so Gethard’s agenda isn’t for his audience, it’s to satiate his own curiosity — thus making the podcast as authentic as possible.
At the end, what makes Beautiful/Anonymous work so well is that it brings out “sonder” in all of us. In the episode “Ron Paul’s Baby,” the caller is a customer service employee, someone who’s easy to get mad at if they can’t solve your problems through the phone. Someone who you only know as a customer service employee, not a person who was delivered by Ron Paul as a baby. Not a person whose mom was in jail, and whose dad didn’t meet him until he was 14. Not a person who has dreams and aspirations, but is so depressed he can’t bring himself to pursue them.
From an outdoorsy mountaineer to a military veteran, Beautiful/Anonymous, as promised, delivers amazing stories from everyday people, making it almost impossible not to feel “sonder.”
