The Two Ways of Seeing
Most people go through life as if they were filling out a form.
Every encounter, every decision, every sentence spoken by another person is slotted into a preexisting category, the familiar template. A situation arises, and the mind says: This is Type A. I’ve seen it before. The response follows automatically, a copy-paste from memory. It’s fast, safe, sterile.
This is the template model of living. It’s how bureaucracies think, how institutions operate, and how most adults survive without asking too many questions. It protects the mind from chaos by standardizing the unknown. But it also reduces the world to a small menu of options. Subtleties vanish. People stop seeing and start matching.
I’ve been a social worker for a decade. I could sleepwalk through my job if I wanted to. The forms, the cases, the scripts, they make it easy. But if I did, who would I be when I talk to my family?
Then there’s the other way: the anthropologist’s way.
The anthropologist doesn’t react by pattern. He enters each moment as if it were foreign ground. He observes before interpreting, listens before labeling, and treats every person, gesture, and space as a clue to something larger. For him, nothing is routine; everything is data.
This approach takes more energy. I try to use it in the social services office, though I don’t always succeed. It requires patience, curiosity, and the courage to admit you don’t know what’s going on. But in return, life stays vivid. The world doesn’t flatten into “cases” and “types.” You stay awake to the differences; the way one person’s silence means shame, another’s means defiance. You begin to notice the gap between what people say and what they mean.
The anthropologist lives without a ready-made map. The template user clings to one, even when it no longer fits the territory. One moves through life like an explorer, the other like a clerk.
The cost of exploration is confusion; the reward is understanding.
The cost of templated living is safety; the reward is numbness.
Most people choose numbness. A few choose confusion and keep their eyes open.
And when I go home from work, that’s what I try to remember to keep my eyes open, so I still recognize the faces that matter.