People watching: a not-so-extreme sport.

I don’t know when or how it started, but I have liked studying other people for as long as I can remember. I think it may have stemmed from the daunting realisation by my middle school self that I have been far too judgemental on both others and myself, and I, inspired by a screenshot of Tumblr post I read on Pinterest, made an effort to start noting one thing I liked about every person I encountered, with the hope that I would one day see myself the same way.

As Nick Carraway famously once said, and very famously contradicted through his own narration, I’m inclined to reserve all judgement.

However, I actually subscibe to this saying, as I will often—almost too often—observe things objectively without ever forming an opinion on said matter. This I think is problematic because it seems these days, everyone has to have an opinion on something, has to be fighting for a cause, or has to be passionate about something—that’s how you get to places in life. But I just don’t care. It’s not that I don’t want to care. I desperately want to, but I just can’t. I don’t know why. I don’t care, and yet I keep a detailed record of minute tidbits about every person I see.

I remember in Kyoto when I was in a laundromat, I caught a glimspe of this older gentleman looking over photos on his phone, presumably ones he took earlier that day—selfies of himself beaming through the phone in front of a backdrop of a lush wall of intertwined cherry blossom trees. I overhead another dad—a Vietnamese man—video calling his children back home. I was reminded of how my own father used to go to Japan on business trips, and, every time without fail, would bring me fridge magnets of Disney princesses he encountered on the way home.

I remember the boy I met in Vung Tau, who would pause for a moment before he ever spoke, as though he was carefully weighing his words, and the way his gentle voice and hesitant laughter made me feel seen and heard.

I remember my Art History professors typing the study guide for our Ancient Egyptian unit in papyrus, and the way their face radiated joy when talking about the prospect of browsing the Art History books in the library.

I remember on the bus back to campus, we drove parallel to a car, and for a split second I saw a little girl sprawled across the backseat, legs in the air, which reminded me of my brother and myself on our winding drives home, with crisps and endless hours of conversation, and that one time I TPed the entire row of backseats in a botched effort to make a swing out of, you guessed it, toilet paper.

At times, I feel like an onlooker, a wallflower, a phenomenon that I have found myself experiencing more and more often as of late. Lately, I have felt more and more like an empty vessel through which the world might be felt though—not an active and participating member of said reality.

And I guess some would say that I don’t care—that I take what I have for granted and I don’t fully feel or grasp the priviledge that I have, just being alive in the first place.

But I would like to counter that. I think that although I need to pay more attention to my own life and register my own thoughts and feelings properly, my preoccupation with others’ lives proves otherwise. I guess in a way, I do care after all.