In support of voyeurism

I sometimes get this weird idea that voyeurism should not be seen as the evil that it is often seen as. I often get such ideas when I am sitting in a dimly lit balcony looking at the apartments in the front or when I am walking on the street and the dark night is hindered by columns of well lit miniaturized windows. It is a mistake to link the innocent pleasures of a voyeur with a necessarily sexual motive. Often, they are quite innocuous. We are naturally curious about other people. Maybe in their imperfect existences we try to find some personal solace; maybe in their picture perfect harmonies, we try to forget our own dissonances. Personally speaking, I find the act of looking at a set of lighted apartments mystifying and intriguing at various levels. To think that I am able to look at these people with a vantage point that none of them will ever be able to take advantage of is exciting enough. There those people are, hardly aware of their neighbors, going about their businesses with a robotic monotonicity, and yet I can see them as part of a bigger picture. By being a voyeur, I can place them in the objective, geometric description, and realize that even at a scale as small as a few apartments, there is not much to differentiate them, nobody is particularly special. I understand that they have their hopes and their ambitions, their pains and insecurities, but for now, this is merely a figment of my own imagination, solely a theoretical possibility. But as is often the case, it is imagination which trumps reality, and I ascribe to them emotions that they might never have and lives of such beauty and intricacy that reality often fails to provide. And all of this grandeur, all of these subtle possibilities, such brilliant color, all of it is neatly tucked into a set of some lighted rooms and a few mundane details. Their cozy little existences, indifferentiable from their neighbors, captures my imagination with both their periodical, repeatable, matchbox like boredom, and the dazzling potential that lies within. I find it amazing to think that each little yellow dot on tall skyscraper contains within itself so many experiences, mistakes, glories, hardships, hope, despair, so much life...

And sometimes, if you are really lucky, your voyeuristic disposition might help solve a grisly murder!