Of Course I Put It Here Also...

Michael Kory Woods: On “People Watching”

“People watching” seems to be an incredible spectacle of the 20th and 21st centuries. I find it very unusual that so many average people engage in this spectacle, myself. What can we possibly get out of it? In addition, people who do not engage in it are now looked down upon, viewed as shy and perhaps even malcontent with their current situation. People who cannot meet eyes with another person today are no longer looked on as being simply shy, but also looked at as being unfriendly simply because of this lack of confidence. I argue that simply because a person does not want to ever meet eyes with another human being does not make them unusual, as today’s standards define it, but it makes them simply shy, as nostalgic beliefs would have one believe.

I believe “people watching” became popular because of society’s newfound devotion to “the corner creep.” This type of person is somebody who would stand in a corner and critique everything everybody did and memorize that action; however, “the corner creep,” would rarely have the confidence to actually look one of the people he is watching in the eye, as a more common person would. Therefore, now today’s societies are spawning a plethora of confident people who try to keep tabs of other’s lives, but fail to do so. By the way, I am not insulting the position of “the corner creep” in society, as a matter of fact, I classify myself as one because of the glee I get out of knowing things I really shouldn’t simply because I watch and listen. Moving on, society is spawning a new creature that tries to perform two tasks and fails at both.

In this manner, society will slowly become more anti-social because they will be attempting to fill a roll of a social person while attempting to fill the role of an on-looker. Doing both is not impossible, but it takes work and many people are not willing to contribute the time it takes to learn the fine art of on-looking, just as I’m not willing to learn how to be social and “fast on my feet,” it simply isn’t worth my time anymore. In the past, people were concerned predominately with their social agenda and not too concerned with other’s social agendas because they had their own to manage. However, today there are many people who attempt to keep track of everybody’s information, but many times fail to do so because doing so would be an extreme tax on their memory and their ability to care. Therefore, these people end up in a limbo between caring enough about other people to try to get to know the intricacies of their lives and perfectly balancing their own social life.

Furthermore, in the future, I believe slowly people will begin to do more and more of this skill called “people watching” and perfect it to the point where they find a safe medium between knowing about people and managing themselves. Until then, we as a society are left with three types of people: overly social, uncaring, cold idiots; people who are social, but somewhat confused about their identity, with a like to watch people’s actions, but never take them into consideration; and people who feel the need or have an addiction to know as much as possible about the people-who-they-care-about’s lives.

This is a phenomenon to say the very least, but until we weed out these people who cannot make up a decision between not caring, caring enough, or overly caring; we will be left with simply confused people who, while they may be intelligent in the academia, are stupid when it comes to knowing about people. If the people who perform this task while attempting to manage a life of their own keep continuing to do both, the deserve the final result, which is the inability to form a sentence and the inability of wasting more space in their mind to remember major events.