Notes & essays

Working late at night, my YouTube playlist wandered into a song from 2014, a Mobinil ad, back when it was still Mobinil, before it became Orange. The concept of that song made me realize how much we've changed. How much I've changed.

The idea is simple, the random person you pass on the street is, really, just another human, as complex as you. But you don't know them. Every day you meet the supermarket guy, the taxi driver, the Uber, the delivery guy, the call center voice, the security guard. You say hi without even looking, and you go about your day. Nothing's wrong with that. But what if we zoomed in a little, to understand the hows and whys of it?

For most of my life, I avoided eye contact with people. It was just too much. Eye contact means responsibility, the responsibility of listening, of paying attention, of actually being seen and seeing someone in return. It means connection. And connection was the exact thing I needed to avoid, for a long time, for many reasons.

As I grew older and started to see things as they are, I realized how important it is to click on those unopened tabs, the people, the lives behind them, their names. What's your name, little guy? Everyone has a name. Everyone has a life, a day just as intense and deep as mine. What a concept.

I've grown fonder of the word "sonder" the older I've gotten, as I started re-meeting people I thought I already knew. It turns out you can know someone by their face and not know them at all, not as a person, not as a human. Rediscovering those people, connecting with them, is one of the things that makes us human. A simple hi, what's your name, a thank you said with their actual name, it can change a lot. It makes them feel seen.

I think life today has made us more afraid of each other. Afraid of seeing something that might scare us, or make us uncomfortable, or make us responsible for understanding or helping. And we're so short on time, we take an Uber every day and never once look at the driver. Part of it is that life, and everything it throws at us, has altered the human design so far from its nature: we no longer focus on understanding and connecting, because we're afraid. And part of it is that some people simply don't feel they need connection anymore. They get enough of it online, surface-level, no strings attached. It feels safer. They see the whole world that way. But in real life they might be afraid to even look themselves in the eye, so how could they look at anyone else?

I don't claim to understand it all, or to have figured any of it out. I'm still trying to understand people, and mostly myself, what they want, what they think. Some people don't want to be seen at all; they want to hide, scared that someone might actually look. And I try, every day, to practice seeing others. Because you can be greedy about it, demanding that everyone see you, while you don't have the capacity to see anyone, or to hold their eyes for even a second.

Empathy is a strange topic for a lot of people. Some avoid it. Some say it's too much. Some say it's for the weak, or the empty-minded. I think it's the most precious thing there is, to be this complex, and still make the time and the space to really see other people. The way you'd want to be seen yourself. Life might be absurd, but being alive is the whole point: meeting people, having the eyes to see them, and letting yourself know them.

Somewhere along the way I realized something. The day I die, some people will actually be able to say they knew me, because they did. I let them see through me, fully, and I was brave enough to know them and look through them too. Yes, they know me. I smile at them when I pass, and I know they have back issues, that they need a calculator because their first university semester is starting soon, that they're afraid of dogs. I wasn't just another shadow passing by. I listened, I saw, and I cared, therefore I existed. And that's all that matters.

Nothing lasts forever; we'll all be gone anyway. You can look at it that way. Every human is an experience. Every creature, too, even my cat, Batoot. I ask myself, almost daily, whether I know him well enough. What makes him sad, what makes him happy. Which food he loves and which he refuses. The specific noise he makes when he wants to play. His favorite hobbies, his favorite spots to sit in the sun, his favorite time of year, his favorite game, the way he explores the world, just like I do. Yes. I know him.

What a thought. Humans. You exist, therefore I exist.