On People-Watching

Wed, 30 Apr 2025

I live in a high-rise across the street from a strip mall. The cornerstone of the mall is a large grocery store, so the parking lot is busy all hours of the day. A strange thing happens with sound high above ground level; it echoes or resonates somehow, and even while indoors I can often hear conversations from below as if I were standing right next to its unknowing participants. I assume most people haven’t lived in a high-rise across the street from a busy lot, and like my past self, have no idea that their words are being projected for an array of tenants to hear.

I live in a high-rise across the street from a strip mall. Often I find myself watching the cars weaving through the parking lot, and the pedestrians maneuvering around them. The cars and the people driving them form a collective organism, whose behavior arises not from synaptic impulses but from traffic laws and the layout of parking spots. If you’ve never sat and watched something like this, you might at first be nervous that someone is going to get hit. From this vantage point it’s easy to see that a car coming around the corner cannot see a pedestrian coming around the other side. It doesn’t seem to matter; the car is always going slow enough, the driver and pedestrian aware enough, that one of them is able to move out of the way. But to be certain, accidents like these do happen, an aneurysm in the hivemind; sometimes I feel like shouting a warning, as if my bird’s-eye-view bestows a responsibility to the safety of the population below. I never do.

I live in a high-rise across the street from a strip mall. During the day, if I’m watching from indoors, it is practically impossible for any of them to know I’m there, as the glare from the sun off of my windows would obscure me from view, even on the unlikely chance anyone would look up to see if anyone is watching them. In that moment, I am a pure observer—as unwilling to affect the subject as I am incapable. That’s an unusually rare position, to observe something so real. We spend the bulk of our days observing our family, our friends, our screens, always an active participant. Everything else was formed by you and curated for your taste. Not this—these are people in their default state, running errands, certainly aware that they are being watched by someone somewhere, but numb enough that it could not possibly affect their behavior. Yet in a way, it feels like this parking lot is curated for me, too.

I live in a high-rise across the street from a strip mall. The balcony is ten stories up, and the risk of falling off of it is impossible to ignore. The ground below is concrete and asphalt; a fall would be certain death. I have no reason to believe this will happen, accidentally or otherwise; there is a sturdy rail that I don’t make a habit of leaning over. Its threat is benign and ever-present. When I focus on a group of people having a conversation below, I feel compelled to jump down, magnetically drawn to be part of it, as if I belong down there and not up here. I think about how nice it would be to freefall for those precious few seconds before the ground catches up with me.

I live in a high-rise across the street from a strip mall. In the far corner sits a seedy bar whose patrons, as best I can gather, are there because they don’t have anything better to do. At night when the rest of the mall is empty and there is little traffic on the road, it’s easy to be distracted by their conversations, often enhanced in volume by their drunkenness. Sometimes I wonder if the yelling I’m hearing is motivated by anger, passion or both. Sometimes it’s easy to tell. I wonder if the woman yelling at a man as she walks away from him is annoyed with her husband or regretful of a first date. I wonder what the man being beaten on the ground by a group of five others did to deserve it. I wonder what the woman sitting with him waiting for the ambulance thinks. I wonder if it would have happened if they knew someone was watching.

I live in a high-rise across the street from a strip mall. Behind it is another apartment complex, larger than my own and with more windows. But I have something they don’t—a clear, unobstructed view of the mall’s parking lot. Behind it is the parking lot for the apartment building, which appears a lot calmer. I wonder if they can hear the calamity and wish they could see what I’m seeing. I feel grateful. I can see into their windows, too, of course, if the lights are on and it’s dark enough. I make out shadows pacing around, nondescript figures standing in doorways, faceless construction workers on the roof. I wonder if they think about the reverse panopticon sitting alongside them and how any one of a hundred different people could be observing them at any moment. I wonder if they wonder the same about us.

I live in a high-rise across the street from a strip mall. In a month, I will not. I watch the parking lot differently now. If it’s an organism then its cells replace themselves several hundred times a day, a steady stream of vehicles arriving and departing for hours on end. I may not have ever seen the same person twice, and it’s certain that many of the people I’ve seen there are now dead. But every day, it feels like the same thing I’ve looked at every day for five years. It looks the same, it sounds the same, it behaves the same. In five years again, this strip mall will stand here, each day bearing witness to hundreds of unique individuals but always the same collectiv. I wish I could take it with me, not the mall or the parking lot or the cars or people in it, but the spectacle. This pastime, to just sit and watch something so natural and predictable, and this position to observe so neutrally. Of course I cannot. But I will certainly miss the feeling of standing here, getting a glimpse into so many lives, watching such raw, natural existence. The parking lot will go on the same without me, but I, in some way, will not go on the same without it.

• Personal
• Essay