On People-Watching

By Adrienne Fung ‘25

When I went back to Hong Kong this summer, I often found myself venturing out alone. I visited places I’ve loved for years, places I used to go, places I’ve never been—parks, shops, cafes, and the like. 

I’m a paranoid traveler; I don’t like looking at my phone on the subway because I’m scared I’ll get robbed without knowing. On my way to each destination, I often turned my gaze to those around me instead. I learned to people-watch, to observe silently without judgment. 

I saw friends with matching outfits and glimpsed a kitten peeking out of an elderly lady’s pocket. A man tripped and dropped his coffee on his shoes, and I winced in sympathy (even as I found his slapstick mistake just the slightest bit amusing). 

And as much as I saw evidence of life, vivid and true as anything, I saw people affixed to screens. 

One girl narrowly avoided a taxi as she crossed the street with AirPods in, seemingly unable to look away from her iPhone. Nobody noticed, not even her, even after the driver honked loudly.

Two office workers crashed into each other, each too busy tapping away to observe their surroundings. At a restaurant, a couple sat across from each other for an hour without saying a word—one was watching a movie, and the other was scrolling through Instagram.

 I’ve started to worry if we’re forgetting how to be real people, in the way that those before us have interacted with the physical world around us. If someone were to collapse to the ground, how many people would stop to help? How many would film? Would anyone notice at all?

Of course, the attractions of our phones are varied and tempting. I’ll be the first to admit that my screen time can rise to shameful numbers. Sometimes, spending time online can feel like a welcome refuge, a better alternative than facing the messiness of life beyond the device. 

But in a day and age where perfect depictions of other people’s lives are instantly available for us to consume and envy, it’s even more crucial that we ground ourselves in life—real life, not whatever our phones decide we want to see.

If all the world really is a stage, like Shakespeare wrote, we must take the time to see it from the audience’s perspective. Otherwise, we’ll never understand the roles that each of us hold in the plays of our lives.

The more I looked around me this summer, the more I wondered about who and what I saw. The shopkeeper napping on a bench by a fountain—what stories could he tell? I glimpsed a mother presenting her daughter with a tiny bouquet of flowers, and thought quietly that I was watching future memories sprout in front of me. Watching, thinking, and learning to love the world I exist in. 

So whenever you find yourself at a restaurant or on the subway, caught in the thrall of your explore page, try looking up, just as I did. You might be surprised at what you find.

Don’t stare, though; people-watching doesn’t have to be as active as its name suggests. It’s not about being nosy, or bugging your eyes out at others and thinking they won’t notice you. 

Rather, it’s about observance. It’s about learning to see yourself in others, in all the laughter and tears and unfortunate coffee spills. Because, in the end, people-watching is just a way to remind ourselves that we, like everyone else, are human.