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

by David Brooks

Human lives aren’t so formulaic; they can’t be reduced to a series of neat stages.

We don’t want to fall back into the old concept of “stages,” but we do want to see life as a succession of common life tasks. Not everybody does the tasks in the same order, and not everybody performs all the tasks, but when we look at someone we want to see them engaged in the heroic activity of their life, tackling this or that task.

Here are a few common life tasks, along with the states of consciousness that arise to help us meet each

consciousness. People with this mindset can be quite self-centered. Their own desires and interests are paramount. The world is a message about me, about how I am valued. People can also be quite competitive at this stage. They want to win praise, achieve glory. Whether

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin strike me as men who experienced an imperial consciousness in childhood, and then never moved beyond it.

person with an interpersonal consciousness has the ability to think psychologically. If you asked somebody embedded in an imperial consciousness who she is, she might talk about her actions and external traits: “I’m a sister. I’m blond. I play soccer.” A person with an interpersonal consciousness is more likely to describe herself according to her psychological traits: “I’m outgoing. I’m growing more confident. I’m kind to others but sometimes afraid people won’t like me.”

Erikson argues, a person must achieve career consolidation or experience drift.

People gripped by the career consolidation task are often driven by a desire for mastery—the intrinsic pleasure of becoming quite good at something. They get up in the morning and work their rut. There’s a big field to be farmed out there, the great project of their vocation, but each day they can only work their rut. When they do that, they have a sense of progress being made.

“The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality.” Eventually the costs become too high. The person at the end of this task realizes that there is a spiritual hunger that’s been unmet, a desire to selflessly serve some cause, to leave some legacy for others.

During the generative life task, people try to find some way to be of service to the world. One either achieves generativity, Erikson argues, or one falls into stagnation. Vaillant defines generativity as “the capacity to foster and guide the next generations.” I like that definition because it emphasizes that people commonly tackle the generativity task at two different points in their lives. First, when they become parents. Parenthood often teaches people how to love in a giving way.

later, when they are middle-aged or older and become mentors. They adopt a gift logic—how can I give back to the world—that replaces the meritocratic logic of the career consolidation years.

generative leader serves the people under him, lifts other people’s vision to higher sights, and helps other people become better versions of themselves.

generative person gives others the gift of admiration—seeing them for the precious creatures they are. She gives the gift of patience—understanding

understanding that people are always developing. He gives them the gift of presence. I know a man who suffered a public disgrace. In the aftermath, one of his friends took him out to dinner every Sunday night for two years—the definition of a generative act.

the struggle to achieve integrity or endure despair. Integrity is the ability to come to terms with your life in the face of death. It’s a feeling of peace that you have used and are using your time well. You have a sense of accomplishment and acceptance. Despair, by contrast, is marked by a sense of regret. You didn’t lead your life as you believe you should have. Despair involves bitterness, ruminating over past mistakes, feeling unproductive. People often evade and externalize their regret.

Wisdom at this phase of life is the ability to see the connections between things. It’s the ability to hold opposite truths—contradictions and paradoxes—in the mind at the same time, without wrestling to impose some linear order. It’s the ability to see things from multiple perspectives. The psychoanalyst Philip M. Bromberg wrote, “Health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them. This is what I believe self-acceptance means and what creativity is really all about—the capacity to feel like one self while being many.”

questions that elicit their life stories. He asks people, for example, to tell him about the high points of their lives, the low points, and the turning points. Half the people he interviews end up crying at some point, recalling some hard event in their lives. At the end of the session, most of them are elated. They tell him that no one has ever asked them about their life story before.

mystery: 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. If you give people a little nudge, they will share their life stories with enthusiasm.

The psychologist Jerome Bruner distinguished between two different modes of thinking, which he called the paradigmatic mode and the narrative mode. The paradigmatic mode is analytical. It’s making an argument. It’s a mental state that involves amassing data, collecting evidence, and offering hypotheses. A lot of us live our professional lives in the paradigmatic mode: making PowerPoint presentations, writing legal briefs, issuing orders, or even, in my case, cobbling together opinion columns. Paradigmatic thinking is great for understanding data, making the case for a proposition, and analyzing trends across populations. It is not great for seeing an individual person.

Narrative thinking, on the other hand, is necessary for understanding the unique individual in front of you. Stories capture the unique presence of a person’s character and how he or she changes over time. Stories capture how a thousand little influences come together to shape a life, how people struggle and strive, how their lives are knocked about by lucky and unlucky breaks. When someone is telling you their story, you get a much more personal, complicated, and attractive image of the person. You get to experience their experience.

What you do for a living shapes who you become. If you spend most of your day in paradigmatic mode, you’re likely to slip into depersonalized habits of thought; you may begin to regard storytelling as non-rigorous or childish, and if you do that, you will constantly misunderstand people. So when I’m in a conversation with someone now, I’m trying to push against that and get us into narrative mode. I’m no longer content to ask, “What do you think about X?” Instead, I ask, “How did you come to believe X?” This is a framing that invites people to tell a story about what events led them to think the way they do. Similarly, I don’t ask people to tell me about their values; I say, “Tell me about the person who shaped

your values most.” That prompts a story.

Then there is the habit of taking people back in time: Where’d you grow up? When did you know that you wanted to spend your life this way? I’m not shy about asking people about their childhoods: What did you want to be when you were a kid? What did your parents want you to be? Finally, I try to ask about intentions and goals. When people are talking to you about their ...

Recently, for example, my wife and I were sitting around with a brilliant woman who had retired from a job she’d held for many years. We asked her a simple question: How do you hope to spend the years ahead? All sorts of stuff spilled out: How she was coping with losing the identity that her job had given her. How, for so long, people came to her asking for things, but now she was forced to humble herself and approach other...

working; now she found it was best just to open herself up to unexpected possibilities and let things in. The story she told us about her previous few years was fascinating, but the best part was that her narrative was so open-ended; her posture...

The ability to craft an accurate and coherent life story is yet another vital skill we don’t teach people in school. But coming up with a personal story is centrally important to leading a meaningful life. You can’t know who you are unless you know how to tell your story. You can’t have a stable identity unless you take the inchoate events of your life and give your life meaning by turning the events into a coherent story. You can know what to do next only if you know what story you are a part of. And you can endure present pains only if you can see them as ...

Sometimes the voice sounds like normal speech, and sometimes it’s a torrent of idea fragments and half-formed thoughts. In his book Chatter, the University of Michigan psychologist Ethan Kross reports on one study suggesting that we talk to ourselves at a rate equivalent to speaking four thousand words a minute out loud. About a quarter of all people hear the sounds of other people’s voices in their heads. About half of all people address themselves in the second person as “you” often or all the time. Some people use their own name when talking to themselves. By the way, the people who address themselves in the second or even the third person have less anxiety, give better speeches, complete tasks more efficiently, and communicate more effectively. If you’re able to self-distance in this way, you should.

Fernyhough observes that our inner speech is often made up of different characters in the mind having a conversation. The Polish researcher Małgorzata Puchalska-Wasyl asked people to describe the characters they heard in their head. She found that people commonly named four types of inner voices: the Faithful Friend (who tells you about your personal strengths), the Ambivalent Parent (who offers caring criticism), the Proud Rival (who badgers you to be more successful), and the Helpless Child (who has a lot of self-pity).

By our late twenties or early thirties, most of us have what McAdams calls an imago, an archetype or idealized image of oneself that captures the role that person hopes to play in society. One person, he finds, might cast himself as the Healer. Another might be the Caregiver. Others maybe be the Warrior, the Sage, the Maker, the Counselor, the Survivor, the Arbiter, or the Juggler.

The healthiest people have arrived at what he calls “identity achievement.” They’ve explored different identities, told different stories about themselves, and finally settled on a heroic identity that works. Less-evolved people may be in a state of “foreclosure.” They came up with an identity very early in their life—I’m the child who caused my parents to divorce, for instance, or I’m the jock who was a star in high school. They rigidly cling to that identity and never update it.

Others may find themselves caught in “identity diffusion.” These are immature people who have never explored their identity. They go through life without a clear identity, never knowing what to do. Then there is “moratorium.” People at this level are perpetually exploring new identities, shape-shifting and trying on one or another, but they never settle on one. They never find that stable imago.

Some people, for example, see their lives as “Overcoming the Monster,” in which the hero defeats some central threat, like alcoholism, through friendship and courage. Other people view their lives as “Rags to Riches,” in which the hero starts out impoverished and obscure and rises to prominence. Or they see their lives as a “Quest,” a story in which the hero undertakes a voyage in pursuit of some goal and is transformed by the journey.

I’m always intrigued by people who see their lives as a surfing story: I caught a wave and rode it, then I caught another wave. Then another. That’s a relaxed acceptance of life few of us can muster.

La Rochefoucauld issued the crucial warning here: “We are so used to disguising ourselves from others that we often end up by disguising ourselves from ourselves.”

Therapists are essentially story editors. People come to therapy because their stories are not working, often because they get causation wrong. They blame themselves for things that are not their fault, or they blame others for things that are. By going over life stories again and again, therapists can help people climb out of the deceptive rumination spirals they have been using to narrate themselves. They can help patients begin the imaginative reconstruction of their lives. Frequently the goal of therapy is to help the patient tell a more accurate story, a story in which the patient is seen to have power over their own life. They craft a new story in

which they can see themselves exercising control.

There’s one more thing that happens as I listen to life stories. I realize I’m not just listening to other people’s stories; I’m helping them create their stories. Very few of us sit down one day and write out the story of our lives and then go out and recite it when somebody asks. For most of us it’s only when somebody asks us to tell a story about ourselves that we have to step back and organize the events and turn them into a coherent narrative. When you ask somebody to tell part of their story, you’re giving them an occasion

to take that step back. You’re giving them an opportunity to construct an account of themselves and maybe see themselves in a new way. None of us can have an identity unless it is affirmed and acknowledged by others. So as you are telling me your story, you’re seeing the ways I affirm you and the ways I do not. You’re sensing the parts of the story that work and those that do not. If you feed me empty slogans about yourself, I withdraw. But if you stand more transparently before me, showing both your warts and your gifts, you feel my respectful and friendly gaze upon you, and that brings forth growth. In every life there is a pattern, a story line running through it all. We find that story when somebody gives an opportunity to tell it.

We live our childhoods at least twice. First, we live through them with eyes of wonderment, and then later in life we have to revisit them to understand what it all meant. As adults, artists often return to their childhood homes as a source of spiritual nourishment and in search of explanations for why they are as they are. Toni Morrison put it this way: “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through,

to appreciate the power of group culture and how it is formed over generations and then poured into a person. But it also means stepping close and perceiving each individual person in the midst of their lifelong project of crafting their own

life and their own point of view, often in defiance of their group’s consciousness. The trick is to hold these two perspectives together at the same time.

To see a person well, you have to see them as culture inheritors and as culture creators.

calls tight and loose cultures. Some groups settled in places where infectious diseases and foreign invasions were common. They developed cultures that emphasized social discipline, conformity, and the ability to pull together in times of crisis. Other groups settled in places that had been spared from frequent foreign invasion and frequent epidemics. Those people developed loose cultures. They tended to be individualistic and creative, but civically uncoordinated, divided, and reckless. The United States, she shows, is a classic loose culture.

emphasized by early Eastern and Western thinkers and philosophers. The classical Greeks, at the source of Western culture, emphasized individual agency and competition. Westerners thus tend to explain a person’s behavior by what’s going on inside their individual mind—the person’s traits, emotions, and intentions.

Early Confucianism, meanwhile, emphasized social harmony. In The Geography of Thought, Nisbett quotes Henry Rosemont, an authority on Chinese philosophy: “For the early Confucians, there can be no me in isolation…I am the totality of roles I live in relation to specific others.” Thus Easterners, he argues, are quicker to explain a person’s behavior by looking at the

context outside the individual’s mind. What is the situation that person fo...

people who are descended from those who practiced plow-heavy agriculture tend to live in cultures that have strongly defined gender roles, because it was mostly men who drove the plow.

people who are descended from those who did non-plow farming tend to have less defined gender roles. People descended from sheepherding cultures tend to be individualistic, because a shepherd’s job requires him to go off on his own.

People descended from rice-farming cultures tend to be very interdependent, because everybody has to work together to raise and harvest rice. One researcher in China found that the divorce rate for people in historic wheat-farming regions was 50 percent highe...

eastern English who settled New England, Fischer writes, were highly moralistic, had an acute awareness of social sin, strongly valued education, were very industrious, were highly time