There is a healthy online business in romanticizing things. In some ways, it’s just a digital version of what has always existed. Carnival Cruises and Disney have always wanted to pitch you on the concept of a dream vacation, even if the reality is waiting in lines and arguing with loved ones in a windowless room. But in the world of social media, romantic advertising has found new competition as a generation has found joy in romanticizing experiences for the love of the game. In a way it’s more pure – If you ignore the attempt at vanity so often intertwined. A lot of travel influencers follow this path, cutting out all of the inconvenience and showing an idealized vision of their lifestyle. On almost every video on TikTok showing New York City you’ll have comment sections gushing about desperately wanting to move there.
Now, don’t get me wrong. New York is entirely one of a kind and, at times, a magical city. When I lived there I enjoyed being able to leave my dorm with no plan and find liveliness and vibrant culture everywhere. But I see comments like that and wonder: do they really understand what they’re saying? New York City isn’t for most people. It isn’t even for me. But the romantic, highly edited TikTok posts would have you thinking it’s an American Utopia. I’m imagining these people getting out at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in abject horror. Still, the most interesting romantics to me are not the ones idealizing the Times Square Olive Garden, but instead the ones highlighting particularly interesting details of everyday life on TikTok. They’ll linger on them, usually with some ambient yet light music overhanging all of it. The top comments regularly declare their creed: “The Art of Noticing.”
As far as romanticization goes, I think this is on the more respectable side. Rather than hocking a product or overhyping a dramatic voyage into the unknown that risks deep disappointment, these are about finding the romance in each day and finding the beauty in what others find mundane. It reminds me of a Thich Nhat Hanh quote:
“If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not “washing the dishes to wash the dishes.” What’s more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can’t wash the dishes, the chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future—and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.”
There is an art in noticing, noticing is the first step in the creative process for literally anything. Noticing isn’t just an art, it is a step within art as well as life. Noticing is all we have, it’s the last line that Ferris Bueller leaves us with — “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” But, as with any romanticization, this one is papering over inconvenient truths. The one here is that noticing is not always a positive thing.
I was at the O’Hare airport in Chicago a few days ago flying back to Boston. I typically hang out in the American Airlines lounge until just before my flight is to board. On this day I had absolutely nailed it. I walked up right as they called boarding group 4 when I was group 6, but my immaculate perfection was interrupted by what I found in front of the service desk – a woman was on the ground, legs being propped up by who I assume were family members. Overhearing her speaking to the medics, it seemed she had something between a small seizure and a fall. Funnily enough, she was still trying to talk her way into boarding the flight. I have to respect the hustle.
I have no hate towards this woman, there was absolutely nothing she could’ve done. But don’t fret, I still found someone to judge: the dozens of people blankly staring at this woman throughout this ordeal. Look – I get it. When you first arrive, you look because you’re genuinely trying to understand what’s happening. You can’t help but to notice. Hell, you’ll probably glance in that direction every few minutes to see if something has changed like I did. But there were dozens and dozens of people in this cramped and damp terminal staring daggers into this woman.
To help you visualize
Are these people just.. oblivious? Are they not self-aware? You’d think you could see this and think – ah, I probably wouldn’t want to be stared at by strangers in this embarrassing circumstance – but clearly not. It’s situations like this that were the genesis of the phrase “take a picture, it’ll last longer.”
I noticed, resisted the instinct to stare, and was on the flight shortly thereafter. A win for my conscience. What was not a win was my failure to download anything to watch on the flight, which forced me to think about random moments of embarrassment from my own past. Quite a few of those were centered around others noticing me in the wrong light. It would’ve been really great if no one had noticed my forgetting that line in my senior year performance of Up the Down Staircase, but I can assure you every person on that stage did. Noticing can be the antagonist in a story like the ones that danced across the cabin that day, in the same way it was an antagonist to the woman who was absent from it.
As it seems, noticing is more of an anti-hero. My hot and cold rollercoaster relationship with noticing took another thundering journey downhill at O’Hare. I have a feeling it’s always going to be up and down.
In 2025, I want to notice. To have a renaissance of the little things, the things I might mistake for mundane. Not in an over-romantic dream state or with a self-serving orbit, but in an honest way. I’d like to mind the gap between attentiveness and my eyes becoming someone else’s daggers. And if someone else could use what I’ve noticed, I’d like to help them see what I see genuinely. Or by making a biting sarcastic remark. Whatever makes more sense to me at the time.
Happy New Year.
Colin
“I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen.”― John Steinbeck,