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

by David Brooks

Wise people don’t just possess information; they possess a compassionate understanding of other people. They know about life.

The real act of, say, building a friendship or 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 a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to let someone down without breaking their heart; knowing how to sit with someone who is suffering; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.

On social media you can have the illusion of social contact without having to perform the gestures that actually build trust, care, and affection. On social media, stimulation replaces intimacy. There is judgment everywhere and understanding nowhere.

And all these different skills rest on one foundational skill: the ability to understand what another person is going through. There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.

Life goes a lot better if you can see things from other people’s points of view, as well as your own.

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

A good conversation is not a group of people making a series of statements at each other. (In fact, that’s a bad conversation.) A good conversation is an act of joint exploration. Somebody floats a half-formed idea. Somebody else seizes on the nub of the idea, plays with it, offers her own perspective based on her own memories, and floats it back so the other person can respond. A good conversation sparks you to have thoughts you never had before. A good conversation starts in one place and ends up in another.

Everyone in a conversation is facing an internal conflict between self-expression and self-inhibition.

Sometimes things that are hard to live through are very satisfying to remember. It’s your job to draw out what lessons they learned and how they changed as a result of what happened.

You may think you’re trying to build a shared connection, but what you are really doing is shifting attention back to yourself. You’re saying, in effect, “Your problems aren’t that interesting to me; let me tell you about my own, much more fascinating ones.” If you want to build a shared connection, try sitting with their experience before you start ladling out your own.

Sometimes a broad, dumb question is better than a smart question, especially one meant to display how well-informed you are.

A third sure way to shut down conversations is to ask vague questions, like “How’s it going?” or “What’s up?” These questions are impossible to answer. They’re another way of saying, “I’m greeting you, but I don’t actually want you to answer.”

People who are lonely and unseen become suspicious. They start to take offense where none is intended. They become afraid of the very thing they need most, which is intimate contact with other humans. They are buffeted by waves of self-loathing and self-doubt.

Politics seems to offer an arena of moral action. To be moral in this world, you don’t have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow. You just have to be liberal or conservative, you just have to feel properly enraged at the people you find contemptible.

And here’s where victimhood turns into villainy. The ones who become mass shooters decide that they are supermen and it is the world that is full of ants. They decide to commit suicide in a way that will selfishly give them what they crave most: to be known, to be recognized, to be famous. They craft a narrative in which they are the hero. The guns seem to have some sort of psychological effect, too. For people who have felt impotent all their lives, guns can provide a narcotic sense of power. The guns are like serpents in the trees, whispering to the lonely.

If mentalizing is me projecting my experiences onto you, caring involves getting out of my experiences and understanding that what you need may be very different from what I would need in that situation.

Decades later, Buechner came to the following realization: “The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from.”

90 percent of what we call writing is actually reading. It’s going back over your work so you can change and improve it. The excavation task is like that. It’s going back and back over events. The goal is to try to create mental flexibility, the ability to have multiple perspectives on a single event. To find other ways to see what happened. To put the tragedy in the context of a larger story.

I go into a dinner party determined to listen deeply, but then I have a glass of wine and start telling stories about myself. I have a civil war going on inside, evidently, between my generative consciousness I aspire to and that little Imperial ego that I can’t quite leave behind. I suspect I’m not alone in this.

We don’t start conversations because we’re bad at predicting how much we’ll enjoy them. We underestimate how much others want to talk; we underestimate how much we will learn; we underestimate how quickly other people will want to go deep and get personal.