An old writing teacher of mine once said to my class, “I read because I’m secretly a peeping Tom. I want more than just a glimpse of someone else’s life–I want to be a full-on voyeur. I want to step into someone else’s skin and see the world from their eyes. Because when else would I ever get to do that?”

So maybe that explains part of the pleasure I get from watching documentaries on Veoh. A user named simply “documentaries” (is it the BBC? an avid documentary fan? the film gods themselves, digitized and uploaded for our mortal amusement?) has hundreds of documentaries online, for free, and I’m starting to worry if my fascination with them has become something of a problem. The documentaries are a veritable sampling of the (intensely) varied human experience and include such titillating titles as “My Car is My Lover,” “The Man With No Past,” “Child Chain Smoker,” “Prostitution Behind the Veil,” and “The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off.” Lest the titles might lead you to believe I’m directing you to a collection of Jerry Springer-esque romps: all of the documentaries (or those I’ve seen, anyway) are both intriguing and refreshingly fair-minded. And most of them are less than one hour long, which means that when you finish one, it doesn’t seem so indulgent to start another, and then another, and then another…

And then suddenly you realize it’s 4am, you’re sprawled on your bed, your feet are on your pillow and your computer in your face, and you’re feeling oddly inspired by young girls rebelling against their racist mother or by men who have found emotional intimacy with their blow-up dolls.

People say the best writing advice is to “write what you know,” but sometimes that’s hard when you want to write about, well, something you don’t know. Like prostitution. Or love with inanimate objects, whether it’s cars, blow-up dolls, or the Eiffel Tower. That’s where these docs come in. Though part of me feels a little prickly about being so engrossed in films about people who live less-than-ordinary lives, and that I might be embodying my old writing teacher’s idea of being a “voyeur” in the worst way, the parts of these documentaries that are ultimately the most gripping are the subjects themselves, stripped of shock value–ordinary people who happen to live in extraordinary situations. And they’re willing to share their experiences and outlook. It’s almost like a crash course on how the other half lives. So go, watch, and get inspired.