How To See Someone Deeply
The art of listening better and seeing people in all their complexity
Hi there,
The world seems to be going crazier every day, and a mix of social, economic, and technological factors is only accelerating the process.
Feeling a sense of dread and anxiety is common. Meeting people in person is becoming rarer. Smartphone (and now AI) addiction is real (here’s how you can start tackling this). There’s a crisis in friendships and dating.
Amidst all the chaos, I found hope in a book I read recently. It’s called How to Know A Person, and I felt inspired reading it because it offered me a slightly different perspective on the polycrisis that we seem to be embroiled in.
One of the big shifts in worldview that I’d encourage you to think about and adopt is this: most of us won’t be able to do jack shit about things like the war in Gaza, the spiraling of our financial system, or the various addictions plaguing societies.
But here’s the thing: We don’t need to.
We don’t need to make decisions that alter the trajectory of the planet and change the course of history. I mean, Mr. Trump is trying to do that, and look at what he’s achieving. Sartre and Camus felt suicidal just thinking about how they were responsible for the daily mundane crap like getting out of bed or taking a ginormous dump.
The good thing is that we only need to take responsibility for our own actions, and the best we can do is to make those count.
It’s the sum total of those acts that can very well make a difference. So instead of wondering why all kids are glued to their phones or how your neighbours don’t give a rat’s ass about you, we must focus on our actions: are we living the things we want to see in the world?
And that brings me to the approach we should take towards other humans:
Through my individual actions, am I seeing people for the beautiful, curious humans they are, with a story so unique that they’re genuinely 1 in a trillion (or whatever the total number of individuals to ever have existed amounts to)?
Am I making an effort to acknowledge this humanity, to try to know them better, and enrich both our lives in the process?
Just flicking this switch and seeing the potential present in each living human can radically alter how we go about our lives and interact with people. Changing this approach can lead to much deeper relationships and a much more meaningful existence.
How do we do that? What are the common mistakes we make while interacting with fellow humans, and what are some ways to get to their depths without writing them off as “stupid bitch” or “greedy asshole” after a 30-second evaluation?
I got some nice ideas here. See if you can start applying them to your conversations:
How not to see people
There are a zillion ways we screw up while interacting with friends, relatives, or strangers. A few common ones that are on display 24/7:
Bad listening: We’re so obsessed with the voice in our head that we fail to listen to the one coming from the person in front of us. So we wait for them to finish, after which we can immediately put our POV on the table, completely ignoring what they said. This is the classic case of just wanting to say things, letting your urge to talk overpower your need to listen to them. Or we’re sometimes so anxious about how we’re coming across, what we must say to not look like a serial rapist, that we fail to notice what was said.
Essentialism: We reduce the person in front of us to a single category, like oh, he’s a religious duffer, or she’s just a spoiled brat who keeps spending her dad’s black money on Korean beauty products. This reduction is a common mental shortcut that cuts off any possibility of knowing a person with all their complexities because we gave in to the auto-judgment features our brains come with.
Static mindset: We often have a static view of a person we met some time back. So if they used to snort cocaine all night in college, we can only think “Junkie” when we meet them a few years later. Doesn’t matter if they took rehab, got their shit together, and are now have a nice job with 7 kids. The static mindset keeps us trapped in the past, dealing with old images instead of seeing the new person in front of us
Naive realism: where we think that our own view of the world is objective and the “right way” to look at things, and that everyone must see it that way. This is how you get people who just can’t understand how a new person they met doesn’t like to drink alcohol or party (“Whoa, what a weirdo, how does she even have a life, bro?”)
Sound familiar?
A good frame while seeing people
As already described, a better frame is to see people as the only possible instantiations of their unique genes, upbringing, circumstances, and ideas.
Seen that way, you’d want to know how *this* particular package is built, what their story and unique worldview are.
What frame can you adopt in your conversations to achieve this?
Loud listening: Let people know you're listening through nodding and constant audio feedback. “Mm-hmm”, “Riiiight,” and “Absolutely!” aren’t just hot air: they’re encouraging signs that signal “Go on. What you’re saying is worth listening to. No one’s falling asleep here, I surely want you to go further and tell me more.” It’s an energy transfer and a great nudge that gets the person in front to open up even more.
Adopting a frame of empathy and generosity is helpful, where we have emotional concern for the person and try to see them as the whole human being they are (instead of reducing them to the one anecdote or story they told), with all of their myriad contradictions.
Looping: It’s helpful to frame the stuff they’ve told and loop it back at them to confirm if you got everything they were saying right. It helps in clarifying because more often than not, we misinterpret stuff, and it helps you help them stay focused on the core points of their story
Make them authors: People often leave out concrete details when telling their stories, like I quit that job because I wasn’t “vibing with my team”. With a frame of curiosity, if we ask them specific questions, it lets them go deeper to help us see their stories more clearly. A good idea is to focus more on the why and how questions, and not just on the whats.
How to know them deeply
Now that you know the right frame for deep listening and understanding, here are some ideas to improve the content of the conversations.
People are much more than the funny drinking story they tell or the sob story they keep repeating. There are some meta-concepts you can focus on to know them:
Life story: Everyone has a unique and interesting life story, but none of us has ever had to tell it before. Man, we haven’t even gotten our closest people to tell us their entire life stories in a structured format over a 2-3 hour session. How amazing would that be? How much would that reveal about the people we care most about, and how many gaps in understanding would that fill? While we can’t do this easily with people we’re meeting for just a coffee or in passing, it always helps to talk about things from a life story perspective. A common fear is that it’s intrusive, but research has shown over and over again that we’re eager to tell our life stories to others (in one study, people gave back the compensation money they were offered to enter the study and tell their life stories- it was such a nice experience!). Unfortunately, it’s the disconnected, polarised, and isolated reality we live in that warps our minds and makes us think people would not want to open up. Heck, people are looking for an opportunity to let the floodgates open and let slip everything they’ve ever experienced on the planet.
Knowing their struggles: A way to know someone deeply is to know what they’ve struggled through and how those struggles have shaped them. When people undergo such a life situation, their worldview changes: they either accommodate that incident into their worldview or alter it completely. You can get post-traumatic stress or post-traumatic growth. Knowing how such a defining moment shaped them will help you peer deep into their souls.
Knowing their life tasks: Often, people are shaped by the ongoing major life task they’ve undertaken: it could be trying to focus on a career, or to find their footing in the social world and become a cool, likable person (typically in teen and college years), or at a point in life where they’ve gone through all the typical stuff and now are driven by the need to give back. Knowing what stage they are in through questions & conversations can offer a window into how they think/what they care about the most.
Knowing what has shaped them: A person always lives in the shadow of her ancestors and culture. She may go to the US, talk with a cringey accent, and rebrand from Gurpreet Randhawa to Gina Rand to sound all hippie and Western, but she can’t escape the fact that her genes are very much Punjabi, that her long past still impacts her behaviours and genetic predispositions. People are either trying to align with their culture, fight it, or try to reconcile their existing worldview with what it offers. Knowing where they lie on this spectrum and how their history has shaped them is a deep way to understand a person.
Every conversation is an opportunity to see a person for who they truly are, and perhaps, in doing so, we start transforming the world, one meaningful connection at a time.
I hope this piece inspires you to do exactly that. If you liked it, share it with someone you like, so we can all try and know each other a bit more than which brand of vodka we like to drink before puking all over the sofa.
And here are a few more articles you’ll enjoy if you liked this one:
What are some books on storytelling that someone should read?