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

by David Brooks

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, stimulation replaces intimacy.

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.

Intriguingly, Ickes finds that the longer8 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.

One day, not long ago, I was reading a dull book at my dining room table when I looked up and saw my wife framed in the front doorway of our house. The door was open. The late afternoon light was streaming in around her. Her mind was elsewhere, but her gaze was resting on a white orchid that we kept in a pot on a table by the door. I paused, and looked at her with a special attention, and had a strange and wonderful awareness ripple across my mind: “I know her,” I thought. “I really know her, through and through.” If you had asked what it was exactly that I knew about her in that moment, I would have had trouble answering. It wasn’t any collection of facts about her, or her life story, or even something expressible in the words I’d use to describe her to a stranger. It was the whole flowing of her being—the incandescence of her smile, the undercurrent of her insecurities, the rare flashes of fierceness, the vibrancy of her spirit. It was the lifts and harmonies of her music.

THE LESSER-MINDS PROBLEM. University of Chicago psychologist Nicholas Epley points out that in day-to-day life we have access to the many thoughts that run through our own minds. But we don’t have access to all the thoughts that are running through other people’s minds. We just have access to the tiny portion they speak out loud. This leads to the perception that I am much more complicated than you—deeper, more interesting, more subtle, and more high-minded.

If you want to understand humanity, you have to focus on the thoughts and emotions of individuals, not just data about groups.

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.

If you consider that each person has a soul, you will be aware that each person has some transcendent spark inside them. You will be aware that at the deepest level we are all equals. 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 novelist Frederick Buechner observed that not all the faces Rembrandt painted were remarkable. Sometimes the subject is just an old man or an elderly lady we wouldn’t look at twice if we passed them on the street. But even the plainest faces “are so remarkably seen by Rembrandt that we are jolted into seeing them remarkably.”

You want to have an explorer’s heart. The novelist Zadie Smith once wrote that when she was a girl, she was constantly imagining what it would be like to grow up in the homes of her friends. “I rarely entered a friend’s home without wondering what it might be like to never leave,”3 she wrote. “That is, what it would be like to be Polish or Ghanaian or Irish or Bengali, to be richer or poorer, to say these prayers or hold those politics. I was an equal-opportunity voyeur. I wanted to know what it was like to be everybody. Above all, I wondered what it would be like to believe the sorts of things I didn’t believe.” What a fantastic way to train your imagination in the art of seeing others.

An education in human variety prepares you to welcome new people into your life.

Ninety percent of life is just going about your business. It’s a meeting at work, a trip to the supermarket, or small talk with another parent while dropping the kids off at school. And usually there are other people around. In these normal moments of life, you’re not staring deeply into another’s eyes or unveiling profound intimacies. You’re just doing stuff together—not face-to-face but side by side. You are accompanying each other.

Through small talk and doing mundane stuff together your unconscious mind is moving with mine and we’re getting a sense of each other’s energy, temperament, and manner. We’re attuning with each other’s rhythms and moods and acquiring a kind of subtle, tacit knowledge about each other that is required before other kinds of knowledge can be broached. We’re becoming comfortable with each other, and comfort is no small thing. Nothing can be heard in the mind until the situation feels safe and familiar to the body.

The person who is good at accompaniment is decelerating the pace of social life. 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.

want me. I’ll be there when the time is right.”6 Accompaniment often involves a surrender of power that is beautiful to behold. A teacher could offer the answers, but he wants to walk with his students as they figure out how to solve a problem. A manager could give orders, but sometimes leadership means assisting employees as they become masters of their own task. A writer could blast out her opinions, but writers are at their best not when they tell people what to think but when they provide a context within which others can think.

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.”

A person is a point of view. Every person you meet is a creative artist who takes the events of life and, over time, creates a very personal way of seeing the world. Like any artist, each person takes the experiences of a lifetime and integrates them into a complex representation of the world. That representation, the subjective consciousness that makes you you, integrates your memories, attitudes, beliefs, convictions, traumas, loves, fears, desires, and goals into your own distinct way of seeing. That representation helps you interpret all the ambiguous data your senses pick up, helps you predict what’s going to happen, helps you discern what really matters in a situation, helps you decide how to feel about any situation, helps shape what you want, who you love, what you admire, who you are, and what you should be doing at any given moment. Your mind creates a world, with beauty and ugliness, excitement, tedium, friends, and enemies, and you live within that construction. People don’t see the world with their eyes; they see it with their entire life.

Your senses give you a poor-quality, low-resolution snapshot of the world, and your brain is then forced to take that and construct a high-definition, feature-length movie.

“The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.”

The universe is a drab, silent, colorless place. I mean this quite literally. There is no such thing as color and sound in the universe; it’s just a bunch of waves and particles. But because we have creative minds, we perceive sound and music, tastes and smells, color and beauty, awe and wonder. All that stuff is in here in your mind, not out there in the universe.

what the eye sees more deeply the heart tends to love more tenderly.

Kids aren’t afraid to ask blunt question. But at some point during late childhood or adolescence, many of us begin to withdraw from intimacy. I’d say it’s because society sends the message that we shouldn’t show emotions, shouldn’t get personal; or it sends the message that if we show the world who we really are, people won’t like us. Asking good questions can be a weirdly vulnerable activity. You’re admitting that you don’t know. An insecure, self-protective world is a world with fewer questions.

I’ve come to think of questioning as a moral practice. When you are asking a good question, you are adopting a posture of humility. You’re confessing that you don’t know and you want to learn. You’re also honoring a person. We all like to think we are so clever that we can imagine what’s going on in another’s mind. But the evidence shows that this doesn’t work. People are just too different from one another, too complicated, too idiosyncratic.

When people feel unseen,7 they tend to shut down socially. 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. After all, it feels shameful to realize that you are apparently unworthy of other people’s attention. Many people harden into their solitude. They create self-delusional worlds.

A hill on campus might actually have a 5 percent grade, but a typical participant would estimate that it had a 20 percent grade. One day Proffitt took a look at the most recent batch of experimental data and was stunned to find that suddenly the students had gotten much better at estimating the grade of a particular hill. Proffitt and his team delved into the mystery and discovered that the latest batch of questionnaires had been filled out by members of UVA’s women’s varsity soccer team. The hills didn’t look so steep because these were extremely fit Division 1 athletes who would have relatively little trouble walking up them. How you see a situation depends on what you are capable of doing in a situation. Since Proffitt first discovered5 this phenomenon, he and other researchers have found it again and again. People with heavy backpacks see steeper hills than people without backpacks, because it is harder for people with backpacks to walk up them. People who have just consumed energy drinks see less steep hills than people who have not. People who have listened to sad music (Mahler’s Adagietto) see steeper hills than people who have listened to happy music. Overweight people see distances as longer than people who are not overweight. Baseball players on a hot streak see bigger balls coming at them than they do when they’re in a slump. When tennis players are playing well, their opponents’ serves seem significantly slower. “We project our individual mental experience into...

Roman dramatist Terence: “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.”

True friendship offers deep satisfactions, but it also imposes vulnerabilities and obligations, and to pretend it doesn’t is to devalue friendship.”

To know a person well, you have to know who they were before they suffered their losses and how they remade their whole outlook after them.

People need recognition from others if they are to thrive. People long for someone to look into their eyes with loving acceptance. Therefore, morality is mostly about the small, daily acts of building connection—the gaze that says “I respect you,” the question that says “I’m curious about you,” the conversation that says, “We’re in this together.”