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

by David Brooks

Washington isn’t filled with the wild kids who stuck the cat in the dryer; it’s filled with the kind of kids who tattled on the kids who stuck the cat in the dryer.)

When I was young, I wanted to be knowledgeable, but as I got older, I wanted to be wise. 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. That is at the heart of being a good person, the ultimate gift you can give to others and to yourself.

“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them,” George Bernard Shaw wrote, “but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.” To do that is to say: You don’t matter. You don’t exist.

Life goes a lot better if you can see things from other people’s points of view, as well as your own. “Artificial intelligence is going to do many things for us in the decades ahead, and replace humans at many tasks, but one thing it will never be able to do is to create person-to-person connections. If you want to thrive in the age of AI, you better become exceptionally good at connecting with others.”

“The roots of resilience,” the psychologist Diana Fosha writes, “are to be found in the sense of being

understood by and existing in the mind and heart of a loving, attuned, and self-possessed other.” In how you see me, I will learn to see myself.

backgrounds. 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 beginning to see you. Certainly, I will never fully experience the world as you experience it, but I’m beginning, a bit, to see the world through your eyes.”

In every crowd there are Diminishers and there are Illuminators. Diminishers make people feel small and unseen. They see other people as things to be used, not as persons to be befriended.

Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people. They have been trained or have trained themselves in the craft of understanding others. They know what to look for and how to ask the right questions at the right time. They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, deeper, respected, lit up.

the longer many couples are married, the less accurate they are at reading each other. 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.

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

The tendency to do the instant size-up is just one of the Diminisher tricks. Here are a few

EGOTISM.

They are simply not curious about other people. ANXIETY.

they have so much noise in their own heads, they can’t hear what’s going on in other heads.

Fear is the enemy of open communication. NAÏVE REALISM.

THE LESSER-MINDS PROBLEM.

Essentialists are quick to use stereotypes to categorize vast swaths of people.

Essentialists imagine that people in one group are more alike than they really are.

THE STATIC MINDSET.

people formed a certain conception of you, one that may even have been largely accurate at some point in time. But then you grew up. You changed profoundly. And those people never updated their models to see you now for who you really are.

Gornick wrote. “In refusing to recover from my father’s death she had discovered that her life was endowed with a seriousness her years in the kitchen had denied her….Mourning Papa became her profession, her identity, her persona.”

Gornick’s book is so good because it illustrates that even in cases where we’re devoted to a person, and know a lot about them, it’s still possible to not see them. You can be loved by a person yet not be known by them.

The Koreans call it nunchi, the ability to be sensitive to other people’s moods and thoughts. The Germans (of course) have a word for it: herzensbildung, training one’s heart to see the full humanity in another.

We’re not equal in might, intelligence, or wealth, but we are all equal on the level of our souls. If you see the people you meet as precious souls, you’ll probably wind up treating them well.

“The shape of our knowledge becomes the shape of our living; the relation of the knower to the known becomes the relation of the living self to the larger world.” Palmer is saying that the way we attend to others determines the kind of person we become. If we see people generously, we will become generous, or if we view them coldly, we will become cold. Palmer’s observation is essential, because he is pointing to a modern answer to an ancient question: How do I become a better person?

Human beings, she finds, are self-centered beings, anxiety-ridden and resentful. We are constantly representing people to ourselves in self-serving ways, in ways that gratify our egos and serve our ends. We stereotype and condescend, ignore and dehumanize.

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

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 of small acts: welcoming a newcomer to your workplace, detecting anxiety in somebody’s voice and asking what’s wrong, knowing how to host a party so that everyone feels included. Most of the time, morality is about the skill of being considerate toward others in the complex situations of life. It’s about being a genius at the close at hand.

Good and evil, Murdoch believes, begin in the inner life, and M wants her inner life to be a little nicer and a little

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

“In therapy, as in life, point of view is everything,” Pipher writes in her book Letters to a Young Therapist. In her practice, she projects a happy realism. The old grand masters of her field, like Freud, saw people driven by dark drives, repressions, and competitive instincts, but Pipher, who cut her professional teeth as a waitress, sees vulnerable, love-seeking people sometimes caught in bad situations. She tries to inhabit each person’s point of view and see them, sympathetically, as those who are doing the

best they can. Her basic viewpoint is charitable to all comers.

ask, How do you treat others? How do you make them feel?

After the illuminating gaze, accompaniment is the next step in getting to know a person.

The first quality I associate with accompaniment is patience.

I know a couple who treasure friends who are what they call “lingerable.” They are the sort of people you want to linger with at the table after a meal or in chairs outside by the pool, to let things flow, to let the relationship emerge. It’s a great talent—to be someone others consider lingerable.

The next quality of accompaniment is playfulness. When Eiseley was

I hope I would have understood, as good accompanists do, that everybody is in their own spot, on their own pilgrimage, and your job is to meet them where they are, help them chart their own course. I wish I had followed

Let others voluntarily evolve. I wish I had understood then that trust is built when individual differences are appreciated, when mistakes are tolerated, and when one person says, more with facial expressions

Finally, a person who is good at accompaniment understands the art of presence. Presence is about showing up. Showing up at

“What I will remember forever is that no one said a word. I am still amazed at the profoundness that can echo in silence. Each person, including newer boyfriends who I knew less well, gave me

reaffirming hug in turn and headed back to their seats. No one lingered or awkwardly tried to validate my grief. They were there for me, just for a moment, and it was exactly what I needed.”

the essayist and poet David Whyte observed that the ultimate touchstone of friendship “is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”

In social life, too, everybody is connected to everybody else by our shared common humanity. Sometimes we need to hitch a ride on someone else’s journey, and accompany them a part of the way.

Events happen in our lives, but each person processes and experiences any given event in their own unique way. Aldous Huxley captured the core reality: “Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.”

In other words, there are two layers of reality. There is the objective reality of what happens, and there is the subjective reality of how what happened is seen, interpreted, made meaningful. That