It’s still early in the year, but most of us have likely settled into a routine. Though mundane, it’s growing increasingly comfortable. We wake up, get a coffee, head to class, meet up with friends for lunch, go to class again and depart for evening club meetings.
Between the busy foot traffic on Comm. Ave., however, we find a calmness in taking a breather and staring out at the life around us.
People watching is almost subconscious. We drift our gaze away from our laptop screens for a moment and proceed to observe everyone else figuring out the next chapter in their lives.
There’s the girl with headphones on, drawing chemical structures in her notebook as she watches a video on her tablet. Her braids are beautiful, but you don’t know she spent the entirety of her eighth-grade year practicing to perfect them.
The athlete across the room is finishing a coffee before heading to afternoon practice. He has an extra shot of espresso because he was up late watching a movie with his friends.
Outside, a tour group is ooh-ing and aah-ing with phones snapping pictures of the sprawling campus. There’s a mother in the group in awe of how much the campus has changed since her time here in the 1990s.
It’s a surreal experience to realize everyone has their own individual life, and you’ll never know the extent of it.
The two friends crossing the street together have gone through totally different mornings — one has just taken a difficult quiz, while the other is about to go on an exciting first date later that evening.
The busy lunch crowd is filled with students pursuing various majors, all at different points in their lives from all over the world. There are people just a few feet away that might become part of your study group in a few semesters or co-workers next month. The guy sitting alone is reading a book that will become your favorite when you find it at a bookstore.
The state of sonder is the realization that everyone in the world has a life as complex and vivid as your own. People watching reinforces this concept into an empowering sense of individualism. You, as your own person, are unique and have lived a life no one else has.
Everyone we see by people watching from our windows and outdoor benches is unique. With niche differences in hairstyle, fashion or even just the posture in their walk, every person is doing something so specific to their personality that we’re never able to completely put it into words. Every person you see is learning the steps to their own dance in life — at a different pace than the person next to them.
People watching means you’ll get a short peek into a litany of intricate lives, all around the long stretch of Comm. Ave., the state of Massachusetts and the rest of the world. Suddenly, the feeling of being minuscule and nearly insignificant falls on you, and it reinforces every little thought that you’re just another human figuring out how to live your life.
But it poses the questions: How unique is your life? If everyone else has their own life, what makes yours so interesting?
The act of subconsciously identifying others’ lives just by a casual glimpse can lead you down a path of existentialism. Everyone plays just one part in billions of parts to keep the world alive and bustling.
So, when your options are entirely up to you, does anything really matter?
When nothing matters, everything matters. With the freedom to do absolutely whatever you please, you are entirely and utterly on your own. Your life is up to you, and that is terrifying and beautiful at the same time. You can be doing something completely wrong and not realize it — and be just another human learning life.
Individualism and existentialism intertwine in the very idea that your life is just as ordinary, yet as unique, as anyone else’s.
Sitting and staring out a window with Lizzy McAlpine’s calm voice through your earbuds is no extraordinary experience, but it is nevertheless a human experience that creates a small escape from the chaos of life. You can watch the passerby as they move about their day and never know what they will be doing next. Conversely, people will watch you and have this exact same thought.
Here’s the fun part, though: You get to choose what you can do. You can make a thousand bad decisions and still make the right one.
When a four-second glimpse into your life is all you can give to a stranger, there is nothing to lose.
So embrace your individuality. Let a stranger watch you try on that new cardigan or juggle a coffee and your phone in one hand with a croissant in another.
Sit in the corner of the cafe with a book and watch that guy you’re pretty sure is in your economics lecture as he does his handshake with his friend from high school. Or watch that girl, whom you see in passing every Tuesday morning, as she holds the door open for the group behind her. Watch as they figure out life the way you’re doing so.
The next time you wonder if you’re doing anything right at all, take a step back and remember it’s everyone else’s first time living, too.
