Squeezed Faces
A strange thing my brain does now: I get onto a train or walk down a street and I’m slightly perplexed that I don’t know the people I’m seeing. They all look familiar. But then I realize: I’ve lived here 30 years, I take this route every day, and so that makes sense: Everyone, statistically, remains a stranger. But nonetheless I keep looking around. Who’s that? Do I know them? Did I work for them? Or did they work for me?
In the immediate neighborhood of my house, or right outside the office, I might see a familiar face—but each location is a tiny puddle of light in the great shadowy map. It’s a world full of strangers.
For a while I thought my brain was slowing down but I think instead it’s just compressing things, putting them together in its strange brain way. You meet thousands of people over years. It’s just normal and accretive when you live and work in a giant city. They come through your house for parties or through your office for work events. And you multiply that by years. All those faces and names get stored away. Eventually your brain fills up and needs to compress the database. And as a result individual examples collapse into archetypes: Pudgy dads in sweaters, middle-aged moms in cool overalls, sons and daughters in their pajama-style clothing. Then I look around in the city, and I see those archetypes everywhere, and they feel so familiar. I don’t know who anyone is, but they all look like people I’ve met.
I wonder if this is normal. My guess is it is. It’s probably why some dads—the non-angry dads, with normal regrets—end up getting quite sweet starting in their 50s, glad to talk to everyone, asking a kid about his Pokémon or listening to someone explain what it’s like to work at the bank, or letting someone tell them about pilates. It’s not because we’re becoming more gentle, it’s just that we’re no longer as good at seeing the edges of people and a lot of the time we don’t have any idea who’s talking to us. We stop seeing what’s different about the individual and instead start seeing what unifies them. And we like it.