THE LOST ART OF PEOPLE WATCHING: OUR PHONES ARE RUINING THE FUN
I don’t know how long the woman on the bus was watching me when I noticed her gaze. I looked over at her, she turned away ( busted!) and so I started pondering her. She was about my age, I’d say, and at least as tired. Her profile reminded me of someone I knew in high school and before you know it I was imagining what she was like as a teenager — conjuring up a few of her good choices and maybe a couple of the not-sogood. Before I could get too far into making up her life story, the bus stopped and we got off and went off in different directions. Heaven knows what story she was making up about me.
One day, after I win the lottery, I am going to fill expensive notepads with little vignettes about total strangers doing mundane things like riding the bus or crossing the street with their hands in their pockets. Maybe I’ll turn the observations into a novel, or a short story, or maybe just a nice stack of expensive notebooks. Novelists infuse their characters with bits and pieces of real people they’ve encountered all the time. Truth is stranger than fiction, after all. And often funnier.
Kristin Wiig developed her head-bobbing, eye-rolling film critic on Saturday Night Live, Aunt Linda, after sitting near a woman on a plane who was watching the Matrix and loudly complaining about the movie’s labyrinthine plot. “I was writing down everything she was saying,” Wiig says. “I take little things people say or do and think ‘What if I exploded it …’ ”
SNL skits lurk everywhere. A successful man I know tells a hilarious story about riding the elevator to his office in his grubby cycling clothes, helmet in hand. Junior colleagues got on, assumed he was a bike courier and ignored him. Oopsie. The senior guy just chuckled, enjoying his invisibility cloak.
We make automatic judgments based on appearance all the time. We may think that we know someone’s income or status in the world based on what they’re wearing, but we judge at our peril. You can glean a lot more accurate information through body language. It’s said when we’re talking to someone, 55 per cent of the communication is body language, 38 per cent is tone of voice and the rest is what we’re actually saying. As we are learning more and more these days, words are really just so much drivel. But our bodies tell the truth. Especially our feet. When you want to leave a conversation or you feel uncomfortable, your feet shift toward the door. “The feet are the most honest part of the body,” says Joe Navarro, a 25-year veteran of the FBI who gave up catching spies to build a small empire writing books and giving presentations about the “science of non-verbal communications.”
When we’re stressed, our bodies try to calm down by bouncing feet or jiggling legs. We wrinkle our noses when we don’t like something. We touch our necks when we’re feeling a threat — a holdover from our back-in-theday-prey-days. We purse our lips when we disagree with someone or hold an alternative view. “When the lips disappear, something is wrong,” Navarro says, and Tucker Carlson and Brett Kavanaugh demonstrate ably. We show confidence by tenting our fingers in front of us in “the steeple.” Everyone loves to see a side head tilt when they’re talking because it means the other person is actually listening.
But our heads are mainly tilted down these days as we all stare at our phones. Sure, the smartphone has revolutionized modern communication and delivered the world to our fingertips, but it sure has taken the fun out of people watching. Look around that coffee shop and you’ll see most people engrossed in their little screens. In fact, you’ll see entire tables of people sitting together with heads bowed and thumbs scrolling. Maybe they’re all chatting about their lattes on WhatsApp? We can hope.
The bulk of people watching has gone online where it’s often art-directed and always highly curated. But for those of us who prefer old-school gawking, all is not lost. For every table of people boringly glued to their device, there’s always someone talking on their phone in public as if they’re in private. And while some may say it’s rude to listen in, I say when someone is blabbing away about their personal life at the hair salon — or critiquing a movie on a plane — you’re not eavesdropping. They’re being obnoxious. And that’s fair game. Just ask Aunt Linda.