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

by David Brooks

The goal of political and media personalities is to produce episodes in which their side is emotionally validated and the other side is emotionally shamed.

to find a way to admire himself.

Politics doesn’t make you a better person; it’s about outer agitation, not inner formation. Politics doesn’t

humanize. If you attempt to assuage your sadness, loneliness, or anomie through politics, it will do nothing more than land you in a world marked by a sadistic striving for domination.

it, they are not loners; they are failed joiners.

crisis: Is it my fault or is it the world’s fault? Am I a loser or are they losers?

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.

The essence of evil is the tendency to obliterate the humanity of another.

Why,

social media, widening inequality, declining participation in community life, declining church attendance, rising populism and bigotry, vicious demagoguery from our media and political elites.

fundamentally moral.

As a society, we have failed to teach the skills and cultivate the inclination to treat each other with kindness, generosity, and respect.

“moral for...

First, it is about helping people learn how to restrain their selfishness and incline their heart to care more about others.

1. Restrain selfishness care for others 2.finding purpose for stability, direction and meaning 3. skills to be kind and considerate.

Second, it’s about helping people find a purpose, so their life has stability, direction, and meaning.

Third, it’s about teaching the basic social and emotional skills so you can be kind and considera...

schools really did focus on moral formation.

“American culture is defined more and more by an absence, and in that absence, we provide children with no moral horizons beyond the self and its well-being.”

In short, several generations, including my own, were not taught the skills they would need in order to see, understand, and respect other people in all their depth and dignity.

The breakdown in basic moral skills produced disconnection, alienation, and a culture in which cruelty was permitted.

We need to rediscover ways to teach moral and social skills. This crisis helped motivate me to write this book.

We meet each other in the current atmosphere of disconnection and distrust.

These days, if you want to know someone well, you have to see the person in front of you as a distinct and never-to-be repeated individual.

The trick is to be able to see each person on these three levels all at once.

goal of Part 2 is to help you understand and be present for people during harsh times, amid the social strife and bitter conflicts of our current age.

discussion, I’ve tried to learn a few things about how to have hard conversations.

it’s important to think about conditions before you think about content.

For people from marginalized or historically oppressed groups, there’s usually a chasm between who you are and how you are perceived.

The encounter between us was an encounter between visibility and invisibility.

Ralph Ellison’s words at the start of Invisible Man

every conversation takes place on two levels: the official conversation and the actual conversation.

that every conversation exists within a frame:

Curiosity is the ability to explore something even in stressful and difficult circumstances.

Remember that the person who is lower in any power structure than you are has a greater awareness of the situation than you do.

When you stand in someone else’s standpoint—seeing the world from the other’s point of view—then all participants in the conversation are contributing to a shared pool of knowledge.

Labeling is when you try to discredit another person by tossing them into some disreputable category:

Micah Goodman,

“A great conversation is between two people who think the other is wrong. A bad conversation is between those who think something is wrong with you.”

Splitting is when you clarify your own motives by first saying what they are not and then saying what they are.

that a rupture is sometimes an opportunity to forge a deeper bond.

hard conversations are hard because people in different life circumstances construct very different realities.

“We project our individual mental experience into the world, and thereby mistake our mental experience to be the physical world, oblivious to the shaping of perception by our sensory systems, personal histories, goals, and expectations,” Proffitt and co-author Drake Baer later wrote in their book Perception.

afford? In Gibson’s language, we see “affordances.”

“We perceive the world, not as it is but as it is for us.”

You can never fully understand a person whose life experience is very different from your own.

Everybody wants to be heard.

when you give a depressed person advice on how they can get better, there’s a good chance all you are doing is telling the person that you just don’t get it.

I learned, very gradually, that a friend’s job in these circumstances is not to cheer the person up. It’s to acknowledge the reality of the situation; it’s to hear, respect, and love them; it’s to show them you haven’t given up on them, you haven’t walked away.

Since Pete’s death, I’ve learned more about the power of just staying present. “If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve to never ask them why,” the actor Stephen Fry once wrote. “Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.”

“There are moments in our lives,” Honoré de Balzac wrote, “when the sense that our friend is near is all that we can bear. Our wounds smart under the consoling words that only reveal the depths of pain.”