People are Strange
People in this culture don’t make eye contact. When you try, they seem to become immediately fascinated by their fingernails or a new development on their shoes. I wonder why this is? I spent a bit of time on the balcony outside the ASCC, the one above the entrance to Archer Gallery. I kept trying to make eye contact with the people below who were looking up, but every time I made a connection, they broke off.
I’ll be the first to admit being far too introspective, but we’ve lost the ability to make connections with people. I don’t know how, I can only guess. One of my theories has to do with our mode of entertainment. We don’t need to go out to the movie theater or the bookstore to be entertained. We can get all of that information, that culture, from home. We don’t even need to leave our homes to eat or work. We can do that all from the comforts of our homes. Maybe this is why our social muscle has atrophied.
Another theory that I have is that people’s aversion to eye contact has nothing to do with our culture, but more to the point our personality; what we think is normal. We betray so much of our emotion and thought through our eyes. We can be read in an instant by one single, actual glance into our eyes. This aversion to eye contact then becomes a self-defense mechanism. We avert our gaze so that other people can’t look at us, look into us.
But this begs another question, why do we fear being understood? If my life, the lives of my friends, and my family are any indication, the average person in this country is relatively good, if a little misguided. Great acts of evil, shame, and guilt are rare, but we all carry this perceived weight on our shoulders, as if we’re ashamed at being alive. These little transgressions that we make in our daily lives are small, but we enlarge them and punish ourselves for them by carrying the weight. We as a people need to learn how to forgive each other, and how to live without turning our heads away from each other.
But while we’re demanding the impossible, I’d like a helicopter, a tropical island with a pirate fortress, and an education that won’t put me into debt for the rest of my life.
