Sonder

                Sonder is the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk. Jack is attempting to learn all of these stories and that's why I think he is always to happy to hitchhike with strangers. Whenever he gets into someone's car, he learns new stories and a new passageway to the few lives he's already learned of is created. "I love the way everybody says L.A. on the Coast, it's their one and only golden town when all is said and done." Jack is so fascinated and filled with admiration for other people, it's not wonder he possesses "sonder".
                Realizing that the world is more complex and grand than just you can make one feel incredibly insignificant and lonely. "'I'm very glad you let me sit with you, I was very lonely and I've been traveling a hell of a lot.'" It's like learning that there is so much more out there in the universe than just Earth. There could be a whole other planet filled with life forms similar to us, and we just don't know it. How small and insignificant would you feel?
                Jack constantly seeks out the stories of other peoples lives but they all come and go, none of them every really stay with him. As many people as Jack meet or as many little adventures he goes on, he'll always end up back alone on the road. This is why it is impossible to know EVERYONE'S lives. I would suppose that after a while, with all of those experiences in mind, one would become crazed. "I don't know why. I began getting the foolish paranoiac idea that Beatrice---her name--- was a common little hustler who worked the nudes for a guys bucks, and that she had regular appointments like ours in L.A." Overwhelming his brain with all different types of "souls" can be reason as to why Jack might confuse people and go a little "mad", which is what I think he's been seeking this whole time. I also suppose that once you've meet so many people and learned all the different combinations of ones "soul" or personality, you would know exactly who you like and what you want. I was at first surprised that Jack and Beatrice got along in the beginning so well and so quickly but Jack is just experienced with people in that sense and therefor knew that he liked her.