How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

by David Brooks

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tattled

emoting

creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being

As a result, a lot of us are lonely and lack deep friendships.

loss of moral knowledge.

And a life spent on social media is not exactly helping people learn these skills.

stimulation replaces intimacy. There is judgment everywhere and understanding nowhere.

someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.

“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them,” George Bernard Shaw wrote, “but to be indifferent to them:

calm in a crisis,

They didn’t feel recognized and valued by their managers and organizations.

a host anticipating the needs of a guest,

If you want to thrive in the age of AI, you better become exceptionally good at connecting with others.” Second,

To survive, pluralistic societies require citizens who can look across difference and show the kind of understanding that is a prerequisite of trust—who can say, at the very least, “I’m

fraying

Diminishers

Illuminators.

each other accurately only about 20 percent

They lock in some early version of who their spouse is, and over the years, as the other person changes, that version stays fixed—and they know less and less about what’s actually going on in the other’s heart and mind. You don’t have

incandescence

“To be able to understand people and be present for them in their experience—that’s the most important thing in the world.”

proclivities

It’s from Vivian Gornick’s classic 1987 memoir Fierce Attachments. Gornick

paroxysms

belligerents

ability to be sensitive to other people’s moods and

training one’s heart to see the full humanity in another.

Some people walk into a room with an expression

The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world.

“I’m going to trust you, before you trust me.”

“Am I a person to you?

I’ll do you the honor of

suspending judgment and letting you be as

Buechner observed that not all the faces Rembrandt

they are failures of the heart.

moribund

misogynist

bohemian,

antitheses.”

narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here

“The shape of our knowledge becomes the shape of our living;

inability to see other people correctly.

Evil happens when people are unseeing, when they don’t recognize the personhood in other

It means that a good person tries to look at everyone with a patient and discerning regard,

The good person tries to cast a selfless attention and to see what the other person sees. This kind of attention leads to the greatness

morality is about the skill of being considerate toward others in the complex situations

has to do with the purification of who she is inside.

“Nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous,”

therapist, she argues, is less about providing solutions and more “a way of paying attention, which is the purest form of love.”