How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen - by David Brooks

The Power of Being Seen

Over the years I came to realize that living in a detached way is, in fact, a withdrawal from life, an estrangement not just from other people but from yourself.

Being open-hearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind, and wise human being. But it is not enough. People need social skills. We talk about the importance of “relationships,” “community,” “friendship,” “social connection,” but these words are too abstract. 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. These are some of the most important skills a human being can possess, and yet we don’t teach them in school.

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.

I wanted to learn this skill for what I think of as spiritual reasons. Seeing someone well is a powerfully creative act. No one can fully appreciate their own beauty and strengths unless those things are mirrored back to them in the mind of another. There is something in being seen that brings forth growth. If you beam the light of your attention on me, I blossom. If you see great potential in me, I will probably come to see great potential in myself. If you can understand my frailties and sympathize with me when life treats me harshly, then I am more likely to have the strength to weather the storms of life.

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. They stereotype and ignore. They are so involved with themselves that other people are just not on their radar screen. 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.

How Not to See a Person

The size-up is what you do when you first meet someone: You check out their look, and you immediately start making judgments about them. The tendency to do the instant size-up is just one of the Diminisher tricks. Here are a few others:

• EGOTISM. The number one reason people don’t see others is that they are too self-centered to try. I can’t see you because I’m all about myself. Let me tell you my opinion. Let me entertain you with this story about myself. Many people are unable to step outside of their own points of view. They are simply not curious about other people.

• ANXIETY. The number two reason people don’t see others is that they have so much noise in their own heads, they can’t hear what’s going on in other heads. How am I coming across? I don’t think this person really likes me. What am I going to say next to appear clever? Fear is the enemy of open communication.

• NAÏVE REALISM. This is the assumption that the way the world appears to you is the objective view, and therefore everyone else must see the same reality you do. People in the grip of naïve realism are so locked into their own perspective, they can’t appreciate that other people have very different perspectives.

• 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.

• OBJECTIVISM. This is what market researchers, pollsters, and social scientists do. They observe behavior, design surveys, and collect data on people. This is a great way to understand the trends among populations of people, but it’s a terrible way to see an individual person. If you adopt this detached, dispassionate, and objective stance, it’s hard to see the most important parts of that person, her unique subjectivity—her imagination, sentiments, desires, creativity, intuitions, faith, emotions, and attachments—the cast of this unique person’s inner world.

• ESSENTIALISM. People belong to groups, and there’s a natural human tendency to make generalizations about them: Germans are orderly, Californians are laid-back. These generalizations occasionally have some basis in reality. But they are all false to some degree, and they are all hurtful to some degree. Essentialists don’t recognize this. Essentialists are quick to use stereotypes to categorize vast swaths of people. Essentialism is the belief that certain groups actually have an “essential” and immutable nature. Essentialists imagine that people in one group are more alike than they really are. They imagine that people in other groups are more different from “us” than they really are.

• THE STATIC MINDSET. Some 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.

Illumination

I began to fully appreciate the power of attention. Each of us has a characteristic way of showing up in the world, a physical and mental presence that sets a tone for how people interact with us. Some people walk into a room with an expression that is warm and embracing; others walk in looking cool and closed up. Some people first encounter others with a gaze that is generous and loving; other people regard those they meet with a formal and aloof gaze. That gaze, that first sight, represents a posture toward the world. A person who is looking for beauty is likely to find wonders, while a person looking for threats will find danger. A person who beams warmth brings out the glowing sides of the people she meets, while a person who conveys formality can meet the same people and find them stiff and detached. “Attention,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being.” The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world.

You may find the whole idea of God ridiculous, but I ask you to believe in the concept of a soul. You may just be chatting with someone about the weather, but I ask you to assume that the person in front of you contains some piece of themselves that has no weight, size, color, or shape yet gives them infinite value and dignity. 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.

If you can attend to people in this way, you won’t be merely observing them or scrutinizing them. You’ll be illuminating them with a gaze that is warm, respectful, and admiring. You’ll be offering a gaze that says, “I’m going to trust you, before you trust me.” Being an Illuminator is a way of being with other people, a style of presence, an ethical ideal. When you’re practicing Illuminationism, you’re offering a gaze that says, “I want to get to know you and be known by you.” It’s a gaze that positively answers the question everybody is unconsciously asking themselves when they meet you: “Am I a person to you? Do you care about me? Am I a priority for you?” The answers to those questions are conveyed in your gaze before they are conveyed by your words. It’s a gaze that radiates respect. It’s a gaze that says that every person I meet is unique, unrepeatable, and, yes, superior to me in some way. Every person I meet is fascinating on some topic. If I approach you in this respectful way, I’ll know that you are not a puzzle that can be solved but a mystery that can never be gotten to the bottom of. I’ll do you the honor of suspending judgment and letting you be as you are. Respect is a gift you offer with your eyes.

In the previous chapter, I listed some of the qualities that make it hard to see others: egotism, anxiety, objectivism, essentialism, and so on. In this one I’d like to list some of the features of the Illuminator’s gaze:

• TENDERNESS. If you want to see a stellar example of how to illuminate people, go back and look at how Mister Rogers used to interact with children. Look at how Ted Lasso looks at his players on that TV show. Look at how Rembrandt rendered faces. When you are in the presence of a Rembrandt portrait, you’re seeing the warts and wounds of the subject, but you’re also peering into their depths, seeing their inner dignity, the immeasurable complexity of their inner lives.

• RECEPTIVITY. Being receptive means overcoming insecurities and self-preoccupation and opening yourself up to the experience of another. It means you resist the urge to project your own viewpoint; you do not ask, “How would I feel if I were in your shoes?” Instead, you are patiently ready for what the other person is offering. As the theologian Rowan Williams put it, we want our minds to be slack and attentive at the same time, the senses relaxed, open, and alive, the eyes tenderly poised.

• ACTIVE CURIOSITY. You want to have an explorer’s heart.

• AFFECTION. We children of the Enlightenment live in a culture that separates reason from emotion. Knowing, for us, is an intellectual exercise. When we want to “know” about something, we study it, we collect data about it, we dissect it. But many cultures and traditions never fell for this nonsense about the separation between reason and emotion, and so they never conceived of knowing as a brain-only, disembodied activity. In the biblical world, for example, “knowing” is also a whole-body experience. In the Bible, “knowing” can involve studying, having sex with, showing concern for, entering into a covenant with, being familiar with, understanding the reputation of.

• GENEROSITY.

• A HOLISTIC ATTITUDE. A great way to mis-see people is to see only a piece of them. Some doctors mis-see their patients when they see only their bodies. Some employers mis-see workers when they see only their productivity. We must resist every urge to simplify in this way.

Accompaniment

When you’re first getting to know someone, you don’t want to try to peer into their souls right away. It’s best to look at something together. What do you think of the weather, Taylor Swift, gardening, or the TV series The Crown? You’re not studying a person, just getting used to them. 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. Small talk and just casually being around someone is a vastly underappreciated stage in the process of getting to know someone. Sometimes you can learn more about a person by watching how they talk to a waiter than by asking some profound question about their philosophy of life. Even when you know someone well, I find that if you don’t talk about the little things on a regular basis, it’s hard to talk about the big things.

Accompaniment, in this meaning, is an other-centered way of moving through life. When you’re accompanying someone, you’re in a state of relaxed awareness—attentive and sensitive and unhurried. You’re not leading or directing the other person. You’re just riding alongside as they experience the ebbs and flows of daily life. You’re there to be of help, a faithful presence, open to whatever may come. Your movements are marked not by willfulness but by willingness—you’re willing to let the relationship deepen or not deepen, without forcing it either way. You are acting in a way that lets other people be perfectly themselves.

The first quality I associate with accompaniment is patience. Trust is built slowly. The person who is good at accompaniment exercises what the philosopher Simone Weil called “negative effort.” This is the ability to hold back and be aware of the other person’s timetable. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them,” Weil wrote. 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.

The next quality of accompaniment is playfulness. When the hosts of retreats and workshops want the participants to get to know each other quickly, they encourage them to play together—whether by means of croquet, cards, music, charades, taking a walk, arts and crafts, or even floating down a river. We do this because people are more fully human when they are at play. In the midst of play, people relax, become themselves, and connect without even trying. Laughter is not just what comes after jokes. Laughter happens when our minds come together and something unexpected happens: We feel the ping of common recognition. We laugh to celebrate our shared understanding. We see each other.

The third quality of accompaniment I should mention is the other-centeredness of it. In normal life, when you’re accompanying someone, you’re signing on to another person’s plan. We’re most familiar with the concept of accompaniment in the world of music. The pianist accompanies the singer. They are partners, making something together, but the accompanist is in the supportive role, subtly working to embellish the beauty of the song and help the singer shine. The accompanist is sensitive to what the singer is doing, begins to get a feel for the experience she is trying to create. Accompaniment is a humble way of being a helpful part of another’s journey, as they go about making their own kind of music.

Finally, a person who is good at accompaniment understands the art of presence. Presence is about showing up. Showing up at weddings and funerals, and especially showing up when somebody is grieving or has been laid off or has suffered some setback or humiliation. When someone is going through a hard time, you don’t need to say some wise thing; you just have to be there, with heightened awareness of what they are experiencing at that moment.

What Is a Person?

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 second subjective layer can sometimes be the more important layer. As the Yale psychologist Marc Brackett puts it, “Well-being depends less on objective events than on how those events are perceived, dealt with, and shared with others.” This subjective layer is what we want to focus on in our quest to know other people. The crucial question is not “What happened to this person?” or “What are the items on their résumé?” Instead, we should ask: “How does this person interpret what happened? How does this person see things? How do they construct their reality?” This is what we really want to know if we want to understand another person.

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.

Cognitive scientists call this view of the human person “constructionism.” Constructionism is the recognition, backed up by the last half century of brain research, that people don’t passively take in reality. Each person actively constructs their own perception of reality. That’s not to say there is not an objective reality out there. It’s to say that we have only subjective access to it. “The mind is its own place,” the poet John Milton wrote, “and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” As we try to understand other people, we want to be constantly asking ourselves: How are they perceiving this situation? How are they experiencing this moment? How are they constructing their reality?

I want to receive you as an active creator. I want to understand how you construct your point of view. I want to ask you how you see things. I want you to teach me about the enduring energies of old events that shape how you see the world today. I’m going to engage with you. Looking at a person is different from looking at a thing because a person is looking back at you. I’m going to get to know you at the same time you’re going to get to know me. Quality conversation is the essence of this approach.

If we’re going to become Illuminators, we need to first ask questions and engage with answers. We need to ask: How does this look to you? Do you see the same situation I see? Then we need to ask: What are the experiences and beliefs that cause you to see it that way? For example, I might ask, What happened to you in childhood that makes you still see the world from the vantage point of an outsider? What was it about your home life that makes celebrating holidays and hosting dinner parties so important to you? You hate asking for favors. Why is that such an issue for you? You seem to have it all, and yet you are insecure. Why is that? As we have these conversations, we’re becoming more aware of the models we use to construct reality. We’re getting to know each other better. We’re also getting to know ourselves better.

Good Talks

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.

I’ve put together a list of some of the nonobvious ways to become a better conversationalist:

• TREAT ATTENTION AS AN ON/OFF SWITCH, NOT A DIMMER. If you are socially anxious, you probably have so many thoughts about yourself dancing around in your head, they threaten to hijack your attention from whatever the person in front of you is saying. The solution as a listener is to treat attention as all or nothing. If you’re here in this conversation, you’re going to stop doing anything else and just pay attention to this. You’re going to apply what some experts call the SLANT method: sit up, lean forward, ask questions, nod your head, track the speaker. Listen with your eyes. That’s paying attention 100 percent.

• BE A LOUD LISTENER. Everyone in a conversation is facing an internal conflict between self-expression and self-inhibition. If you listen passively, the other person is likely to become inhibited. Active listening, on the other hand, is an invitation to express. One way to think of it is through the metaphor of hospitality. When you are listening, you are like the host of a dinner party. You have set the scene. You’re exuding warmth toward your guests, showing how happy you are to be with them, drawing them closer to where they want to go. When you are speaking, you are like a guest at a dinner party. You are bringing gifts.

• FAVOR FAMILIARITY. The social psychologist Gus Cooney and others have found that there is a “novelty penalty” when we speak. People have trouble picturing and getting excited about the unfamiliar, but they love to talk about what they know. To get a conversation rolling, find the thing the other person is most attached to. If they’re wearing a T-shirt from their kid’s sports team, ask about that. If they’ve got a nice motorcycle, lead with a question about it.

• MAKE THEM AUTHORS, NOT WITNESSES. People aren’t specific enough when they tell stories. They tend to leave out the concrete details. But if you ask them specific questions—“Where was your boss sitting when he said that? And what did you say in response?”—they are likely to revisit the moment in a more vivid way. Good conversationalists ask for stories about specific events or experiences, and then they go even further. They don’t only want to talk about what happened, they want to know how you experienced what happened. They want to understand what you were feeling when your boss told you that you were being laid off. Was your first thought “How will I tell my family?” Was your dominant emotion dread, humiliation, or perhaps relief? Then a good conversationalist will ask how you’re experiencing now what you experienced then. In retrospect, was getting laid off a complete disaster, or did it send you off on a new path that you’re now grateful for? 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.

• DON’T FEAR THE PAUSE. Like a good improv comedian, a good conversationalist controls her impatience and listens to learn, rather than to respond. That means she’ll wait for the end of the other person’s comment, and then pause for a few beats to consider how to respond to what’s been said, holding up her hand, so the other person doesn’t just keep on talking. Taking that extra breath creates space for reflection.

• DO THE LOOPING. Psychologists have a concept they call looping. That’s when you repeat what someone just said in order to make sure you accurately received what they were trying to project. Conversation experts recommend this somewhat clumsy practice because people tend to believe they are much more transparent than they really are, and that they are being clearer than they really are. Somebody might say, “My mother can be a real piece of work” and assume that the other person knows exactly what she’s talking about. The experts suggest that when somebody expresses something important, you respond to their story with a question like “What I hear you saying is that you were really pissed at your mother.” If you try this looping method, you will realize how often you are interpreting people incorrectly; that speaker might come back with “No, I wasn’t angry at my mother. I just felt diminished by her. There’s a difference.” Looping forces you to listen more carefully. Other people will sense the change in you. Looping is also a good way to keep the other person focused on their core point, rather than drifting away on some tangent. The problem is that some people, including me, feel a little phony when we’re looping. If I say, “So what I hear you saying is…” six times in a twenty-minute conversation, I’m going to wind up sounding more like a shrink performing analysis than a friend having a conversation. So I try to do it, but in a less formal way. I find it more natural to paraphrase what they just said—“So you’re really pissed at your mom?”—and pause to see if they agree with my paraphrase.

• THE MIDWIFE MODEL. Many good conversations are reciprocal. Both people talk about half of the time. But some good conversations are, by necessity, lopsided. One person is going through a hard time or facing a big life decision, and the other person is accompanying them in their process of deliberation. When ministering to others in such circumstances, good conversationalists adopt the posture of a midwife. A midwife is there not to give birth but simply to assist the other person in their own creation. In conversation, a midwife is there not to lead with insights but to receive and build on the insights the other person is developing. The midwife is there to make the person feel safe, but she is also there to prod. There are always ways we’re not fully honest with ourselves. The midwife is there to encourage a deeper honesty.

• KEEP THE GEM STATEMENT AT THE CENTER. In the midst of many difficult conversations, there is what the mediator Adar Cohen calls “the gem statement.” This is the truth underneath the disagreement, something you both agree on: “Even when we can’t agree on Dad’s medical care, I’ve never doubted your good intentions. I know we both want the best for him.” If you can both return to the gem statement during a conflict, you can keep the relationship between you strong.

• FIND THE DISAGREEMENT UNDER THE DISAGREEMENT. When arguing, the natural thing is to restate your point of view until the other person sees the issue the way you do. The more interesting thing to do is to ask, “Why, at heart, do we disagree? What is the values disagreement underneath our practical disagreement?” Maybe you disagree on gun regulations because deep down you have radically different notions of public safety or of the role of government, or maybe one of you is from a rural town and the other is from a city. When you search for the disagreement under the disagreement, you are looking for the moral, philosophical roots of why you each believe what you do. You’re engaged in a mutual exploration. Suddenly, instead of just repeating our arguments, we’re pulling stories out of each other.

• DON’T BE A TOPPER. If somebody tells you they are having trouble with their teenage son, don’t turn around and say, “I know exactly what you mean. I’m having incredible problems with my Steven.” 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.

The Right 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. As the psychologist Nicholas Epley observes, perspective taking is untrustworthy, but perspective receiving works quite well. If I’m going to get to know you, it’s not because I have the magical ability to peer into your soul; it’s because I have the skill of asking the sorts of questions that will give you a chance to tell me about who you are.

The worst kinds of questions are the ones that don’t involve a surrender of power, that evaluate: Where did you go to college? What neighborhood do you live in? What do you do? They imply, “I’m about to judge you.”

Closed questions are also bad questions. Instead of surrendering power, the questioner is imposing a limit on how the question can be answered. For example, if you mention your mother and I ask, “Were you close?,” then I’ve limited your description of your relationship with your mother to the close/distant frame. It’s better to ask, “How is your mother?” That gives the answerer the freedom to go as deep or as shallow as he wants.

Humble questions are open-ended. They’re encouraging the other person to take control and take the conversation where they want it to go. These are questions that begin with phrases like “How did you…,” “What’s it like…,” “Tell me about…,” and “In what ways…”

Sometimes you’re at a neighborhood barbecue or a work function with people you don’t know or barely know at all. When an Illuminator is in those situations, he’ll ask questions that probe for commonalities. I’ve learned to sometimes ask, “Where did you grow up?” which gets people talking about their hometown. I travel a lot for work, so there’s a good chance I’ll know something about their place. Other easy introductory questions are things like “That’s a lovely name. How did your parents choose it?” That prompts conversations about cultural background and family history. Those conversations often go off in good directions.

Other times you’ll be at a dinner table or a retreat with people you know at least decently well or want to know decently well. In this situation Illuminators ask big questions. It’s easy to have a pleasant evening if only small questions are on the table, but it’s possible to have a truly memorable dinner if someone asks a big question.

Big questions interrupt the daily routines people fall into and prompt them to step back and see their life from a distance. Here are some of my favorite questions that do that: “What crossroads are you at?” At any moment, most of us are in the middle of some transition. The question helps people focus on theirs. “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” Most people know that fear plays some role in their life, but they haven’t clearly defined how fear is holding them back. “If you died tonight, what would you regret not doing?” “If we meet a year from now, what will we be celebrating?” “If the next five years is a chapter in your life, what is that chapter about?” “Can you be yourself where you are and still fit in?”

Peter Block is an author and consultant who writes about community development and civic engagement. He is a master at coming up with questions that lift you out of your ruts and invite fresh reevaluations. Here are some of his:

• What is the no, or refusal, you keep postponing?

• What have you said yes to that you no longer really believe in?

• What forgiveness are you withholding?

• How have you contributed to the problem you’re trying to solve?

• What is the gift you currently hold in exile?

Mónica Guzmán, the journalist I quoted in the last chapter, asks people, “Why you?” Why was it you who started that business? Why was it you who felt a responsibility to run for the school board?

We too often think that deep conversations have to be painful or vulnerable conversations. I try to compensate for that by asking questions about the positive sides of life: “Tell me about a time you adapted to change.” “What’s working really well in your life?” “What are you most self-confident about?” “Which of your five senses is strongest?” “Have you ever been solitary without feeling lonely?” or “What has become clearer to you as you have aged?”

The Epidemic of Blindness

Social disconnection warps the mind. When people feel unseen, 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. “Loneliness obfuscates,” the interdisciplinary scientist Giovanni Frazzetto writes in his book Together, Closer. “It becomes a deceiving filter through which we see ourselves, others, and the world. It makes us more vulnerable to rejection, and it heightens our general level of vigilance and insecurity in social situations.” We see ourselves as others see us, and when we feel invisible, well, we have a tendency to fall to pieces.

Our problem, I believe, is 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. I realize the phrase “moral formation” may sound stuffy and archaic, but moral formation is really about three simple, practical things. First, it is about helping people learn how to restrain their selfishness and incline their heart to care more about others. 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 considerate to the people around you.

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. Our failure to treat each other well in the small encounters of everyday life metastasized and, I believe, led to the horrific social breakdown we see all around us. This is a massive civilizational failure. We need to rediscover ways to teach moral and social skills.

Hard Conversations

By hard conversations, I mean conversations across differences and across perceived power inequalities. These hard conversations include the ones between family members who find themselves in different partisan tribes, managers whose authority is questioned by younger employees, students furious because they are inheriting such a broken world, populist outsiders who feel the coastal elite insiders are betraying them at every turn. These conversations often start with suspicion, animosity, resentment. People may want to connect, but their communications start off reserved, guarded.

Every conversation takes place on two levels: the official conversation and the actual conversation. The official conversation is represented by the words we say about whatever topic we are nominally discussing: politics, economics, workplace issues—whatever. The actual conversation occurs in the ebb and flow of underlying emotions that get transmitted as we talk. With every comment you are either making me feel a little more safe or a little more threatened. With every comment I am showing you either respect or disrespect. With every comment we are each revealing something about our intentions: Here is why I am telling you this. Here is why this is important to me. It is the volley of these underlying emotions that will determine the success or failure of the conversation. The authors of Crucial Conversations also remind us that every conversation exists within a frame: What is the purpose here? What are our goals? A frame is the stage on which the conversation takes place.

The Scots have a word that’s useful in this context: “ken”; you may be familiar with it from the expression “beyond your ken.” It comes from sailors who used the word to describe the area as far as they could see to the horizon. If you’re going to have a good hard conversation with someone, you have to step into their ken. If you step into someone’s ken, it shows that you at least want to understand. That’s a powerful way to show respect. The authors of Crucial Conversations observe that in any conversation, respect is like air. When it’s present nobody notices, but when it’s absent it’s all anybody can think about.

I’ve learned that if you find yourself in a hard conversation that is going south, there are ways to redeem it. First, you step back from the conflict, and you try to figure out together what’s gone wrong. You break the momentum by asking the other person, “How did we get to this tense place?” Then you do something the experts call “splitting.” Splitting is when you clarify your own motives by first saying what they are not and then saying what they are. You say something like “I certainly wasn’t trying to silence your voice. I was trying to include your point of view with the many other points of view on this topic. But I went too fast. I should have paused to try to hear your voice fully, so we could build from that reality. That was not respectful to you.” Then you try to reidentify the mutual purpose of the conversation. That’s done by enlarging the purpose so that both people are encompassed by it. “You and I have very different ideas of what marketing plan this company should pursue. But we both believe in the product we are selling. We both want to get it before as many people as possible. I think we are both trying to take this company to the next level.” Finally, you can take advantage of the fact that a rupture is sometimes an opportunity to forge a deeper bond. You might say, “You and I have just expressed some strong emotions. Unfortunately, against each other. But at least our hearts are out on the table and we’ve both been exposed. Weirdly, we have a chance to understand each other better because of the mistakes we’ve made, the emotions we’ve aroused.”

How Do You Serve a Friend Who Is in Despair?

It was only later that I read that 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 tried to remind Pete of all the wonderful blessings he enjoyed, what psychologists call “positive reframing.” I’ve since read that this might make the sufferer feel even worse about themselves for not being able to enjoy all the things that are palpably enjoyable. 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.

If I’m ever in a similar situation again, I’ll understand that you don’t have to try to coax somebody out of depression. It’s enough to show that you have some understanding of what they are enduring. It’s enough to create an atmosphere in which they can share their experience. It’s enough to offer them the comfort of being seen.

Each mind constructs its own reality. In normal circumstances, I can get a sense of my friend’s perception of reality because it largely overlaps with my perception of reality. But depression changes that. In depression Andrew Solomon was experiencing a reality that was just bizarre. The guy thought showers were terrifying. Pete also experienced a reality that was bizarre. He saw a world without pleasure. When we are trying to see a depressed person deeply, and make them feel heard and understood, we are peering into a nightmarish Salvador Dalí world, one that doesn’t follow any of our logic, that doesn’t make any sense, and that the depressed person will probably have difficulty describing for us. There is no easy way to get even partly into this alternate reality; we can only try to persevere through a leap of faith, through endless flexibility, and through a willingness to be humble before the fact that none of this makes any sense.

The Art of Empathy

Every child, even from birth, is looking for answers to the basic questions of life: Am I safe? How does love work? Am I worthy? Will I be cared for? Even in infancy, we internalize answers to those questions based on what we see around us and how we are treated. This education happens even though later, as adults, we have no conscious memory of this period at all. When, in adulthood, you get to know someone really well, you often develop a sense for how they were raised. You see in some people’s current insecurities how as children they must have been diminished and criticized. You see, in their terror over being abandoned, how they must have felt left behind when young. On the other hand, when you meet people who assume that the world is safe and trustworthy, that others will naturally smile upon them, you sense how as children they must have felt illuminated by love.

If you hope to know someone well, you have to know something about the struggles and blessings of their childhoods and the defensive architecture they carry through life. Here are a few of the defenses that many people carry inside, sometimes for the rest of their lives:

• AVOIDANCE. Avoidance is usually about fear. Emotions and relationships have hurt me, so I will minimize emotions and relationships. People who are avoidant feel most comfortable when the conversation stays superficial. They often overintellectualize life. They retreat to work. They try to be self-sufficient and pretend they don’t have needs. Often, they have not had close relationships as kids and have lowered their expectations about future relationships. A person who fears intimacy in this way may be always on the move, preferring not to be rooted or pinned down; they are sometimes relentlessly positive so as not to display vulnerability; they engineer things so they are the strong one others turn to but never the one who turns to others.

• DEPRIVATION. Some children are raised around people so self-centered that the needs of the child are ignored. The child naturally learns the lesson “My needs won’t be met.” It is a short step from that to “I’m not worthy.” A person haunted by a deprivation schema can experience feelings of worthlessness throughout life no matter how many amazing successes they achieve. They often carry the idea that there is some flaw deep within themselves, that if other people knew it, it would cause them to run away. When they are treated badly, they are likely to blame themselves. (Of course he had an affair; I’m a pathetic wife.) They sometimes grapple with a fierce inner critic.

• OVERREACTIVITY. Children who are abused and threatened grow up in a dangerous world. The person afflicted in this way often has, deep in their nervous system, a hyperactive threat-detection system. Such people interpret ambivalent situations as menacing situations, neutral faces as angry faces. They are trapped in a hyperactive mind theater in which the world is dangerous. They overreact to things and fail to understand why they did so.

• PASSIVE AGGRESSION. Passive aggression is the indirect expression of anger. It is a way to sidestep direct communication by a person who fears conflict, who has trouble dealing with negative emotions. It’s possible such a person grew up in a home where anger was terrifying, where emotions were not addressed, or where love was conditional and the lesson was that direct communication would lead to the withdrawal of affection. Passive aggression is thus a form of emotional manipulation, a subtle power play to extract guilt and affection. A husband with passive-aggressive tendencies may encourage his wife to go on a weekend outing with her friends, feeling himself to be a selfless martyr, but then get angry with her in the days before the outing and through the weekend. He’ll let her know by various acts of withdrawal and self-pity that she’s a selfish person and he’s an innocent victim.

Empathy is involved in every stage of the process of getting to know a person. But it is especially necessary when we are accompanying someone who is wrestling with their wounds. The problem is that a lot of people don’t know what empathy really is. They think it’s an easy emotion: You open up your heart and you experience this gush of fellow feeling with another person. By this definition, empathy feels simple, natural, and automatic: I feel for you. But that’s not quite right. Empathy is a set of social and emotional skills. These skills are a bit like athletic skills: Some people are more naturally talented at empathy than others; everybody improves with training.

Empathy consists of at least three related skills. First, there is the skill of mirroring. This is the act of accurately catching the emotion of the person in front of you.

Emotions contain information. Unless they are out of control, emotions are supple mental faculties that help you steer through life. Emotions assign value to things; they tell you what you want and don’t want. I feel love for this person and want to approach him; I feel contempt for that person and want to avoid her. Emotions help you adjust to different situations. You find yourself in a threatening situation and you feel anxiety. This emotional state alters your thinking so you are quick to look for danger. Emotions also tell you whether you are moving toward your goals or away from them. If I want to know you, it’s moderately important that I know what you think, but it’s very important that I have some sense of the flow of what you feel.

A person who is good at mirroring is quick to experience the emotions of the person in front of them, is quick to reenact in his own body the emotions the other person is holding in hers. A person who is good at mirroring smiles at smiles, yawns at yawns, and frowns at frowns. He unconsciously attunes his breathing patterns, heart rate, speaking speed, posture, and gestures and even his vocabulary levels. He does this because a good way to understand what another person is feeling in their body is to live it out yourself in your own body, at least to some extent.

People who are good at mirroring also have what the Northeastern University neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett calls high “emotional granularity,” the ability to finely distinguish between different emotional states.

The second empathy skill is not mirroring but mentalizing. Most primates can mirror another primate’s emotions at least to some degree. Only humans can figure out why they are experiencing what they are experiencing. We do this by relying on our own experience and memory. As with all modes of perception, we ask, “What is this similar to?” When I see what a friend is experiencing, I go back to a time in my life when I experienced something like that. I make predictions about what my friend is going through based on what I had to go through. This is what the eighteenth-century philosopher and economist Adam Smith presciently called “projective” empathy: the act of projecting my memories onto your situation. As we do this, we rise to a higher level of empathy.

The third empathy skill is caring. Con artists are very good at reading people’s emotions, but we don’t call them empathetic, because they don’t have genuine concern for the people they are reading. Children are very good at empathetic distress—feeling what you are feeling—but are not as good at empathetic concern: knowing what to do about it. 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. This is hard. The world is full of people who are nice; there are many fewer who are effectively kind.

Here are some practices that can help you develop your empathy skills:

• CONTACT THEORY. Decades ago, the psychologist Gordon Allport built on the obvious point that it’s hard to hate people close up. He found that bringing hostile groups together really does increase empathy in each group. But the group dynamics have to be structured just right. It helps, for example, to put people in a circle to demonstrate that everybody in the group is equal to everybody else. It helps to give the group a shared focus and a common goal, so that from the start they are working to build something together. A community is a group of people with a common project.

• DRAW IT WITH YOUR EYES CLOSED. People become more empathetic when they take the time to closely observe the people around them. I’ve found that actors are particularly good at this.

• LITERATURE. Researchers have found that people who read are more empathetic. Plot-driven genre books—thrillers and detective stories—do not seem to increase empathy skills. But reading biographies or complex, character-driven novels and plays like Beloved or Macbeth, in which the reader gets enmeshed in the changing emotional life of the characters, does.

• EMOTION SPOTTING. The emotion scholar Marc Brackett has developed a tool to improve a person’s emotional granularity, something he calls the “mood meter.” It is based on the idea that emotions have two core dimensions, energy and pleasantness. So he constructed a chart with four quadrants. The top right quadrant contains emotions that are high in pleasantness and high-energy: happiness, joy, exhilaration. The bottom right quadrant contains emotions that are high in pleasantness but low-energy: contentment, serenity, ease. The top left contains emotions that are low in pleasantness but high-energy: anger, frustration, fear. The bottom left contains emotions that are low-energy and low in pleasantness: sadness, apathy. The mood meter is a map of human emotions. At any given moment you can pause, figure out where your mood is on the map, and attempt to assign it a label. This exercise, Brackett notes, gives people “permission to feel”—permission to choose not to bottle up their emotions but to acknowledge and investigate them.

• SUFFERING. As Montaigne once observed, you can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but you can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom. There are certain things you simply have to live through in order to understand. And so another way we grow more empathic is simply by living and enduring the slings and arrows that life generally brings.

How Were You Shaped by Your Sufferings?

People who are permanently damaged by trauma seek to assimilate what happened into their existing models. People who grow try to accommodate what happened in order to create new models. The person who assimilates says, I survived brain cancer and I’m going to keep on chugging. The person who accommodates says, No, this changes who I am…I’m a cancer survivor….This changes how I want to spend my days. The act of remaking our models involves reconsidering the fundamentals: In what ways is the world safe and unsafe? Do things sometimes happen to me that I don’t deserve? Who am I? What is my place in the world? What’s my story? Where do I really want to go? What kind of God allows this to happen?

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. If a subtext of this book is that experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you, then one of the subsequent lessons is that to know someone who has grieved, you have to know how they have processed their loss—did they emerge wiser, kinder, and stronger, or broken, stuck, and scared? To be a good friend and a good person you have to know how to accompany someone through this process.

How does this process of excavation work? How do we help each other go back into the past and reinvent the story of our lives? There are certain exercises that friends can do together. First, friends can ask each other the kinds of questions that help people see more deeply into their own childhoods. Psychologists recommend that you ask your friend to fill in the blanks to these two statements: “In our family, the one thing you must never do is ____” and “In our family, the one thing you must do above all else is ____.” That’s a way to help a person see more clearly the deep values that were embedded in the way they were raised.

Second, you can try “This Is Your Life.” This is a game some couples play at the end of each year. They write out a summary of the year from their partner’s point of view. That is, they write, in the first person, about what challenges their partner faced and how he or she overcame them. Reading over these first-person accounts of your life can be an exhilarating experience. You see yourself through the eyes of one who loves you. People who have been hurt need somebody they trust to narrate their life, stand up to their own self-contempt, and believe the best of them.

The third exercise is called “Filling in the Calendar.” This involves walking through periods of the other person’s life, year by year. What was your life like in second grade? In third grade?

The fourth is story sampling. For decades, James Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin has had people do free-form expressive-writing exercises. He says: Open your notebook. Set a timer for twenty minutes. Write about your emotional experiences. Don’t worry about punctuation or sloppiness. Go wherever your mind takes you. Write just for yourself. Throw it out at the end. In the beginning, people who take part in expressive-writing exercises sometimes use different voices and even different handwriting styles. Their stories are raw and disjointed. But then unconscious thoughts surface. They try on different perspectives. Their narratives grow more coherent and self-aware as the days go by. They turn from victims to writers.

The fifth exercise is my favorite. Put aside all the self-conscious exercises and just have serious conversations with friends. If you’ve lost someone dear to you, tell each other stories about that person. Reflect on the strange journey that is grief; tell new stories about what life will look like in the years ahead.

Personality: What Energy Do You Bring into the Room?

Over the past decades, psychologists have cohered around a different way to map the human personality. This method has a ton of rigorous research behind it. This method helps people measure five core personality traits. Psychologists refer to these as the Big Five. The Big Five traits are extroversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness.

EXTROVERSION

We often think of extroverts as people who derive energy from other people. In fact, people who score high in extroversion are highly drawn to all positive emotions. They are excited by any chance to experience pleasure, to seek thrills, to win social approval. They are motivated more by the lure of rewards than the fear of punishment. They tend to dive into most situations looking for what goodies can be had. If you follow extroverts on social media, you’ll see that their posts teem with comments like “Can’t wait!” “So excited!!” and “Love my life!!!” People who score high in extroversion are warm, gregarious, excitement seekers. People who score high on extroversion are more sociable than retiring, more fun-loving than sober, more affectionate than reserved, more spontaneous than inhibited, and more talkative than quiet.

Extroversion is generally a good trait to have, since high extroverts are often so much fun to be around. But all traits have their advantages and disadvantages. As studies over the years have shown, people who score high in extroversion can be quick to anger. They take more risks and are more likely to die in traffic accidents. They are more likely to abuse alcohol in adolescence and less likely to save for retirement. Extroverts live their lives as a high-reward/high-risk exercise. People who score low on extroversion just seem more chill. Such people have slower and less volatile emotional responses to things. They are often creative, thoughtful, and intentional. They like having deeper relationships with fewer people. Their way of experiencing the world is not lesser than that of high-extroversion people, just different.

CONSCIENTIOUSNESS

If extroverts are the people you want livening up your party, those who score high in conscientiousness are often the ones you want managing your organization. People who score high on this trait have excellent impulse control. They are disciplined, persevering, organized, self-regulating. They have the ability to focus on long-term goals and not get distracted. People high in conscientiousness are less likely to procrastinate, tend to be a bit perfectionist, and have high achievement motivation. They are likely to avoid drugs and to stick to fitness routines.

Just as this trait has its upsides, like all traits, it also has its downsides too. People high in conscientiousness experience more guilt. They are well suited to predictable environments but less well suited to unpredictable situations that require fluid adaptation. They are sometimes workaholics. There can be an obsessive or compulsive quality to them.

NEUROTICISM

If extroverts are drawn to positive emotions, people who score high in neuroticism respond powerfully to negative emotions. They feel fear, anxiety, shame, disgust, and sadness very quickly and very acutely. They are sensitive to potential threats. They are more likely to worry than to be calm, more highly strung than laid-back, more vulnerable than resilient. If there is an angry face in a crowd, they will fixate on it and have trouble drawing their attention away. People who score high in neuroticism have more emotional ups and downs over the course of the day.

High neuroticism in adolescence predicts lower career attainment and worse relationships in adulthood. But, like all traits, neuroticism has its upsides as well. It prepares people for certain social roles. If your community is in danger, it helps to have a prophet who can spot it early on. If there is a lot of emotional pain in your community, it’s good to have a person who scores high in neuroticism, like Sigmund Freud, around to study and understand it. If there’s a need for social change, it’s useful to have indignant people who are calling for it. In a world in which most people are overconfident about their abilities and overly optimistic about the outcomes of their behavior, there’s a benefit in having some people who lean the other way.

AGREEABLENESS

Those who score high on agreeableness are good at getting along with people. They are compassionate, considerate, helpful, and accommodating toward others. Such people tend to be trusting, cooperative, and kind—good-natured rather than foul-tempered, softhearted rather than hard-edged, polite more than rude, forgiving more than vengeful. Those who score high in agreeableness are naturally prone to paying attention to what’s going on in other people’s minds.

OPENNESS

If agreeableness describes a person’s relationship to other people, openness describes their relationship to information. People who score high on this trait are powerfully motivated to have new experiences and to try on new ideas. They tend to be innovative more than conventional, imaginative and associative rather than linear, curious more than closed-minded. They tend not to impose a predetermined ideology on the world and to really enjoy cognitive exploration, just wandering around in a subject. Artists and poets are the quintessential practitioners of openness.

Reality is a little more fluid for such people. They report having more transcendent spiritual experiences and more paranormal beliefs. When they wake up in the morning, they are sometimes not sure if they experienced something the previous day or merely dreamed it the night before. One study showed that having a mystical experience while consuming mushrooms led to a sharp increase in openness even a year later. Such people are able to appreciate a wide array of artistic forms. When we approach a painting or a song, we want it to be familiar but also a bit surprising. That’s known as the fluency sweet spot. People low in openness feel comfortable when the artwork feels familiar. People high in openness find anything moderately familiar to be boring.

Life Tasks

The life tasks continue to roll, throughout one’s life. The theme of this chapter is that if you want to understand someone well, you have to understand what life task they are in the middle of and how their mind has evolved to complete this task.

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

THE IMPERIAL TASK

Pretty early in life, sometime in boyhood or girlhood, each of us has to try to establish a sense of our own agency. We have to demonstrate to ourselves and others that we can take control, work hard, be good at things. In the middle of this task, Erikson argues, a person has to either display industry or succumb to inferiority. If children can show themselves and the world that they are competent, they will develop a sense of self-confidence. If they can’t, they will experience feelings of inferiority. To establish a sense of agency, people develop what Kegan calls an imperial 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 it’s in sports or schoolwork or music or something else, they crave other people’s positive judgments about their own value.

We tolerate this somewhat self-centered consciousness in kids and teenagers, but sometimes the imperial consciousness carries on into adulthood. An adult who has never left this mindset behind experiences his days as a series of disjointed contests he wants to win. Whether in business, pickup basketball, or politics, he has an intense desire to see himself as a winner, and a touchy pride that causes him to react strongly against any sign of disrespect. For people with this consciousness, relationships tend to be instrumental. The person is always angling, manipulating the situation to get what he wants. He is emotionally sealed up, hiding any vulnerabilities, even from himself.

THE INTERPERSONAL TASK

There’s a rough rhythm to life. Periods that are dominated by an intense desire to stand out and be superior are often followed by periods dominated by an intense desire to fit in. For many of us there’s a moment in life, often in adolescence, when the life task is to establish your social identity. Friendships and social status become the central obsessions in our lives. At this point, Erikson notes, the person will either achieve intimacy or suffer isolation. The person who succeeds at this life task develops the ability to be an intimate partner, a devoted lover, and a faithful friend. Those who can’t fall into isolation. The mind adjusts to meet the challenge. A 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.” A person with this consciousness has a greater capacity to experience another person’s experience.

People in the midst of the interpersonal task often become idealistic. The person with an interpersonal consciousness can not only experience other people’s experiences, she can experience the experience of humanity as a whole. She can feel the pain of the community and be driven to heal that pain. Kegan writes that at this moment the person goes from being physical to being metaphysical. She sees not only what is but also the ideal of what might be. Teenage idealism can be intense but also dogmatic and unforgiving. The purpose of idealism, at this moment of consciousness, is not only to seek the common good; it’s also to help you bond more tightly with some group. I fight injustice because it makes me cool, helps me belong; that’s what superior people like us do. During this task, people are quick to form cliques and think a lot about social status. The interpersonal person’s ultimate question is: Do you like me? At this point, her own self-appraisal is not yet the arbiter of her sense of self-worth. The opinions of others are still the ultimate arbiters. That is a voracious master to try to please. As Seneca put it, “Nature’s wants are small, while those of opinion are limitless.” This also leads to a lot of conformism.

A person in this consciousness tends to be conflict averse, tends to be a pleaser. She has trouble saying no to people and is afraid of hurting their feelings. She suppresses her moments of anger. Anger would be a declaration that she has a self that is separate from the social context. She doesn’t yet possess that separate independent self. So instead of feeling angry when she is affronted, she feels sad or wounded or incomplete. Part of the problem is that her conception of self is not sturdy enough to stand up to people.

CAREER CONSOLIDATION

At a certain point in life, we have to find the career that we will devote ourselves to, the way we will make a difference in the world—whether it’s a job or parenting or something else entirely. While confronting this task, Erikson argues, a person must achieve career consolidation or experience drift. Most of us figure out what to do through a process of experimentation and fit. Some people bounce around among different jobs and try new projects. The psychologist Brian Little argues that people generally have on average fifteen “personal projects” going at any one time. These can be small, like learning to surf, or larger, like serving as an apprentice to a plumber. During these periods of experimentation, life can feel scattered. But eventually, many of us become passionate about one vocation in particular.

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. As usual, the consciousness changes to meet the task. People in the midst of career consolidation often develop a more individualistic mindset: I am the captain of my own ship, the master of my own destiny. They become better at self-control, at governing their emotions. They possess a greater ability to go against the crowd. They are able to say no to things that might distract them from their core mission.

Carl Jung once wrote, “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. This crisis sometimes comes as a sense that you simply no longer want what you used to want.

It’s not that all desire is quenched at the end of this task. It’s just that one set of desires has been satisfied. People in this moment of crisis can suddenly get gripped by thicker and bigger desires. At the end of the career consolidation task, they realize they have overly differentiated themselves from others and the world around them. It’s time to come in from the cold.

THE GENERATIVE TASK

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. And 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. Many people adopt the generative mindset when they get promoted to a leadership position.

The generative person often assumes the role of guardian. A person with this consciousness is often leading or serving some institution, whether it is a company, a community organization, a school, or a family. A guardian has an in-depth respect for the institution she has inherited. She sees herself as someone who has been entrusted with something, has taken delivery of something precious and thus has a responsibility to steward it, and to pass it along in better shape than she found it. A person with this mindset is defined not by what she takes out of the institution but by what she pours into it. At this moment in maturity, such a person fully appreciates that she didn’t create her own life. The family she grew up in, the school she went to, and the mentors and friends and organizations who helped her all implanted certain values, standards of excellence, a way of being. She is seized with a fervent desire to pass it on.

INTEGRITY VERSUS DESPAIR

The final task Erik Erikson wrote about was 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. They become mad at the world, intent on displacing their disappointment about themselves into anger about how everything is going to hell.

People in this stage often have a strong desire to learn. The lecture halls of the world are filled with senior citizens who seek greater knowledge and wisdom. The explanatory drive that was there when they were babies is still there now. 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.

Life Stories

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. As I hope I’ve made clear by now, people are eager, often desperate, to be seen, heard, and understood. And yet we have built a culture, and a set of manners, in which that doesn’t happen. The way you fix that is simple, easy, and fun: Ask people to tell you their stories.

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. We live in a culture that is paradigmatic rich and narrative poor.

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 intentions, they are implicitly telling you about where they have been and where they hope to go.

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 part of a story that will yield future benefits.

As people are telling me their stories, I’m listening hard for a few specific things. First, I’m listening for the person’s characteristic tone of voice. Just as every piece of writing has an implied narrator—the person the writer wants you to think he is—every person has a characteristic narrative tone: sassy or sarcastic, ironic or earnest, cheerful or grave. The narrative tone reflects the person’s basic attitude toward the world—is it safe or threatening, welcoming, disappointing, or absurd? A person’s narrative tone often reveals their sense of “self-efficacy,” their overall confidence in their own abilities.

So when I’m listening to someone tell their story, I’m also asking myself, What characters does this person have in his head? Is this a confident voice or a tired voice, a regretful voice or an anticipating voice?

The next question I’m asking myself as people tell me their stories is: Who is the hero here? 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. When someone is telling me their story, I find that it’s often useful to ask myself, What imago are they inhabiting? As McAdams writes, “Imagoes express our most cherished desires and goals.”

The third thing I’m asking myself as people tell me their stories is: What’s the plot here? We tend to craft our life stories gradually, over a lifetime. Children don’t really have life stories. But around adolescence most people begin imposing a narrative on their lives.

The next question I ask myself when hearing stories is: How reliable is this narrator? I guess all of our stories are false and self-flattering to some degree. The seventeenth-century French moralist François de 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.” Some people, however, take fabulation to the extreme. They are beset by such deep insecurities and self-doubts that when you ask them to tell their story, what you end up getting is not an account but a performance.

Finally, when I’m hearing life stories, I’m looking for narrative flexibility. Life is a constant struggle to refine and update our stories. Most of us endure narrative crises from time to time—periods in which something happened so that your old life story no longer makes sense.

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.

These days, as I hear people tell me their stories, I try to listen the way I listen to music. I try to flow along with the melodies, feeling the rises and dips along with them. Like music, stories flow; they are about rhythm and melody. I’m aware that telling a life story can be a form of seduction. So I’m asking myself, Are they giving me a full story?

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.

How Do Your Ancestors Show Up in Your Life?

It’s like this for many of us. There’s a certain spot on this earth that is somehow sacred, the place where you come from, the place you never quite leave. When you think back to your hometown or home neighborhood, sometimes it’s the very soil and mountains that you remember, the way a certain wind would blow through a certain kind of crop, perhaps the way a certain factory would scent the town. Always it’s the people, the characters in the small dramatic panorama that was, when you were a child, your whole life.

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.

Each person’s consciousness is formed by all the choices of her ancestors, going back centuries: who they married, where they settled, whether they joined this church or that one. In other words, a person is part of a long movement, a transmission from one generation to another, and can only be seen rightly as part of that movement.

The challenge in seeing a person, therefore, is to adopt the kind of double vision I mentioned in the chapter on hard conversations. It means stepping back 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. And you have to manage both these things at a level of high complexity. One of the great fallacies of life is to think culture is everything; another great fallacy is to think culture is nothing. I’ve found it helpful to start with the idea that each of us exists in a state of givenness. Each of us can say, “I am the receiver of gifts. I am part of a long procession of humanity and I have received much from those who came before.” But people are not passive vessels into which culture is poured; each person is a cultural co-creator, embracing some bits of their culture, rejecting others—taking the stories of the past and transforming them with their own lives. To see a person well, you have to see them as culture inheritors and as culture creators.

What is culture? It’s a shared symbolic landscape that we use to construct our reality. People who grow up in different cultures see the world differently—sometimes on the most elemental level.

The cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand studies what she 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.

One has to be very careful with these kinds of generalizations. It’s not as if you can dump all people from the West in a box called “individualism” and all people from the East in a box called “collectivism,” but the averages of behavior in each community are different. You have to look for the generalization but then see through the generalization; if this person grew up in an individualistic culture but is very communal, what does it say about him? I’m trying to emphasize the presence of the past, how the dead live in us.

So when I see you, I want to see back into the deep sources of your self. That means asking certain key questions: Where’s home? What’s the place you spiritually never leave? How do the dead show up in your life? How do I see you embracing or rejecting your culture? How do I see you creating and contributing to your culture? How do I see you transmitting your culture? How do I see you rebelling against your culture? How do I see you caught between cultures?

What Is Wisdom?

I like to think of these little everyday insights as moments of wisdom. Wisdom isn’t knowing about physics or geography. Wisdom is knowing about people. Wisdom is the ability to see deeply into who people are and how they should move in the complex situations of life. That’s the great gift Illuminators share with those around them.

I’ve come to believe that wise people don’t tell us what to do; they start by witnessing our story. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations, and episodes we tell, and see us in a noble struggle. They see the way we’re navigating the dialectics of life—intimacy versus independence, control versus uncertainty—and understand that our current self is just where we are right now, part of a long continuum of growth.

The really good confidants—the people we go to when we are troubled—are more like coaches than philosopher-kings. They take in your story, accept it, but push you to clarify what it is you really want, or to name the baggage you left out of your clean tale. They ask you to probe into what is really bothering you, to search for the deeper problem underneath the convenient surface problem you’ve come to them for help about. Wise people don’t tell you what to do; they help you process your own thoughts and emotions. They enter with you into your process of meaning-making and then help you expand it, push it along. All choice involves loss: If you take this job, you don’t take that one. Much of life involves reconciling opposites: I want to be attached, but I also want to be free. Wise people create a safe space where you can navigate the ambiguities and contradictions we all wrestle with. They prod and lure you along until your own obvious solution emerges into view. Their essential gift is receptivity, the capacity to receive what you are sending. This is not a passive skill. The wise person is not just keeping her ears open. She is creating an atmosphere of hospitality, an atmosphere in which people are encouraged to set aside their fear of showing weakness, their fear of confronting themselves. She is creating an atmosphere in which people swap stories, trade confidences. In this atmosphere people are free to be themselves, encouraged to be honest with themselves.

We all know people who are smart. But that doesn’t mean they are wise. Understanding and wisdom come from surviving the pitfalls of life, thriving in life, having wide and deep contact with other people. Out of your own moments of suffering, struggle, friendship, intimacy, and joy comes a compassionate awareness of how other people feel—their frailty, their confusion, and their courage. The wise are those who have lived full, varied lives, and reflected deeply on what they’ve been through.

Successful friendship, like successful therapy, is a balance of deference and defiance. It involves showing positive regard, but also calling people on their self-deceptions. The Buddhists have a useful phrase for unconditional positive regard: “idiot compassion,” which is the kind of empathy that never challenges people’s stories or threatens to hurt their feelings. It consoles but also conceals.

Wisdom is a social skill practiced within a relationship or a system of relationships. Wisdom is practiced when people come together to form what Parker Palmer called a “community of truth.” A community of truth can be as simple as a classroom—a teacher and students investigating some problem together. It can be two people at a table in a coffee shop, noodling over some problem. It can be as grand as the scientific enterprise. Science moves forward as thousands of minds dispersed all across the world pool their separate imaginations to look together at some problem. Or it can be as intimate as one person alone reading a book. One author’s mind and one reader’s mind coming together, sparking insight.

A community of truth is created when people are genuinely interested in seeing and exploring together. They do not try to manipulate each other. They do not immediately judge, saying, “That’s stupid” or “That’s right.” Instead, they pause to consider what the meaning of the statement is to the person who just uttered it. When we are in a community of truth, we’re trying on each other’s perspectives. We’re taking journeys into each other’s minds. It gets you out of the egotistical mindset—I am normal, what I see is objective, everyone else is odd—and instead gives you the opportunity to take a journey with another person’s eyes.

A funny thing happens to people in a community of truth. Somebody has a thought. The thought is like a little circuit in their brain. When someone shares a thought and others receive it, then suddenly the same circuit is in two brains. When a whole classroom is considering the thought, it’s like the same circuit in twenty-five brains. Our minds are intermingling. The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter calls these circuits loops. He argues that when we communicate, and loops are flowing through different brains, we are thinking as one shared organism, anticipating each other, finishing each other’s sentences. “Empathy” is not a strong enough word to describe this intermingling. It is not one person, one body, one brain that marks this condition, Hofstadter argues, but the interpenetration of all minds in ceaseless conversation with each other.