my thoughts on people watching.

There are countless human living on this earth. Every single one of them has peculiar behaviors, each person has their own gestures, each person has a unique way of speaking, walking, eating. These infinite number of humans which has infinite ways of expressing themselves, make the world an amazing place for observation.

People have an interest in what is different from them, starting from a very early age. It is quite exciting for children to watch adults' lives. I remember when I was little, I used to love watching my dad shave, his face covered in white foam; shaving looked like a fantastic experience to me. Whenever he was shaving, I would run to him, stand in front of the mirror and watch him. This is my oldest memory of the pleasure I get from watching someone. I think we all grow up watching others, observing how they live, and that is what shapes our character. Human observation is like an innate instinct that helps us learn about life. But I cannot restrict human observation to just an act of 'benefit'. Although we unconsciously teach ourselves to live in the master-apprentice relationship thanks to this urge to watch people, I think we mostly do people watching for our own pleasure. 

Our own body, our own home, and the people we have seen all the time since we were born, start being not that interesting for us at some point. People around us since we born, are familiar; they do not create new scenes. For the brand new scenes, brand new behaviors and brand new gestures; streets offer a great opportunity. The streets are the house of the flaneur, and there are not "usual ones" in the streets but “ever-changings”. As the streets take us from one place to another, they also offer us something we have no chance to do anywhere: people watching. Sometimes, when walking with all sorts of thoughts in our head, our eyes get caught in a woman's arm full of paper bags. What are in those? Where is she taking them? We make a judgment about where she came from and where she is going just by looking the behaviors of the woman, the way the woman walks and the outfit she preferred. That woman's life arouses our curiosity, and I think the greatest motivation behind people watching is, this curiosity.

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