Do you ever walk away from a conversation feeling like the other person never really saw you? Like they were just waiting for their turn to speak, or worse, like you were barely there at all?
I know that feeling intimately. For years, I was the guy standing on the sidelines of my own life, observing others, analyzing them, but never quite connecting. David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, describes this exact experience in his latest book. He calls people like his former self “Diminishers”, people who make others feel small and unseen.
Then there are “Illuminators”, the rare people who make you feel bigger, deeper, and truly understood.
How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (Random House, 2023) is Brooks’s attempt to help all of us become Illuminators. And honestly? It arrived at exactly the right moment.
Table of Contents
Overview
Here’s the core argument in one sentence: The single most important skill for a healthy life, and a healthy society, is the ability to see another person deeply and make them feel seen.
Brooks builds this case across 320 pages, divided into three parts:
- “I See You” , The foundational skills of attention, accompaniment, and conversation
- “I See You in Your Struggles” , How to be present for people in pain, depression, and conflict
- “I See You with Your Strengths” , Understanding personality, life stories, and what makes people wise
The Core Argument
Brooks argues that we’re living through an “epidemic of blindness.” The statistics are staggering:
- 54% of Americans say no one knows them well
- 36% feel lonely frequently or almost all the time
- Time spent with friends dropped from 6.5 hours per week in 2013 to just 2 hours and 45 minutes in 2021
- Teen depression rates jumped from 26% in 2009 to 44% in 2021
- Suicide rates increased by 33% between 1999 and 2019
His diagnosis? We’ve lost the skills—and the inclination—to truly see each other. We’ve become “Diminishers” who make others feel small, rather than “Illuminators” who make others feel valued.
“Human beings need recognition as much as they need food and water. No crueler punishment can be devised than to not see someone, to render them unimportant or invisible.”
How to Know a Person draws on psychology, neuroscience, literature, and Brooks’s own personal journey from emotional detachment to something approaching genuine human warmth. It’s part memoir, part practical guide, and part moral philosophy, all wrapped in Brooks’s signature accessible prose.
Who Will Actually Love How to Know a Person (And Who Might Bounce Off It)
You’ll love How to Know a Person if:
- You’ve ever felt lonely in a crowded room
- You want to be a better listener but don’t know where to start
- You’re tired of surface-level conversations and crave something deeper
- You work in a people-focused profession, teaching, healthcare, management, therapy, HR
- You’ve lost someone to depression or suicide and want to understand how to support others
- You’re genuinely curious about why people are the way they are
You might bounce off it if:
- You’re looking for a quick-fix “10 steps to better relationships” manual (this is more of a mindset shift)
- You prefer hard data over personal anecdotes and literary references
- You’re deeply skeptical of the self-help genre and its earnestness
- You find Brooks’s political centrism or religious references off-putting
For me? This book landed like a punch to the chest, in the best possible way.
Introduction
Title: How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
Author: David Brooks
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: October 24, 2023
Pages: 320
Who Is David Brooks?
David Brooks is a Canadian-born American journalist, born August 11, 1961. He’s been an op-ed columnist for The New York Times since September 2003 and a regular commentator on PBS NewsHour since 2004. He graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in history in 1983.
Brooks has written several bestselling books, including Bobos in Paradise, The Social Animal, The Road to Character, and The Second Mountain. His work tends to explore the intersection of psychology, sociology, morality, and American culture. He’s also taught at Yale University.
What’s interesting about Brooks is that he’s not just a journalist writing about other people’s ideas. He’s been on a very public personal journey, from the emotionally detached observer he describes in the opening pages of this book to someone who’s trying, often imperfectly, to become more open-hearted.
How to Know a Person‘s Central Purpose
The book’s central thesis appears in the very first chapter:
“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.”
Brooks argues that this skill, the ability to truly know another person, is the foundation of everything good in life: friendships, marriages, workplaces, communities, and even democracy itself.
Background
The Epidemic of Blindness
Brooks opens Part 2 with a chapter called “The Epidemic of Blindness”, and the statistics he presents are genuinely alarming:
Suicide rates increased by 33% between 1999 and 2019
Between 2009 and 2019, the percentage of teens reporting “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26% to 37%. By 2021, it had shot up to 44%
The percentage of Americans who said they have no close friends quadrupled between 1990 and 2020
In one survey, 54% of Americans reported that no one knows them well
36% of Americans reported feeling lonely frequently or almost all the time, including 61% of young adults
In 2013, Americans spent an average of 6.5 hours per week with friends. By 2021, that number had dropped to just 2 hours and 45 minutes
More recent data from Gallup confirms this trend hasn’t reversed. In 2023-2024, 25% of U.S. men aged 15 to 34 said they felt lonely “a lot” of the previous day, significantly higher than the national average of 18%. Overall, 20% of U.S. adults report feeling lonely on a daily basis, affecting an estimated 52 million Americans.
Brooks argues this isn’t just a personal problem, it’s a societal crisis. When people feel unseen, they shut down, become suspicious, and sometimes lash out. The “epidemic of blindness” feeds into political polarization, rising hate crimes, and the general coarsening of public life.
Brooks’s Personal Journey
What makes How to Know a Person feel different from other relationship advice is Brooks’s willingness to be vulnerable about his own struggles. He opens the book by describing his emotionally repressed upbringing in what he calls “the other kind of Jewish family”, reserved, stiff-upper-lip types who “Think Yiddish, act British”.
He describes himself as a “practiced escape artist” who would make meaningful eye contact with people’s shoes and then excuse himself. He tells a painfully relatable story about catching a shattered baseball bat at a game and just sitting there, expressionless, instead of celebrating.
“I had the emotional capacity of a head of cabbage,” he writes.
But Brooks also shows how he changed, slowly, imperfectly, but genuinely. He describes being transformed by a panel discussion with theater people, by becoming a father, by enduring life’s inevitable blows. He even shares that Oprah told him she’d “rarely seen someone change so much” between his two appearances on her show.
This personal stake gives the book credibility. Brooks isn’t preaching from on high, he’s sharing what he’s learned from his own failures.
How to Know a Person Summary
Let me walk you through the core ideas. I’ve organized this by the book’s major sections, pulling out the most useful concepts.
Part 1: “I See You” , The Foundations
The Power of Being Seen
Brooks argues that recognition is as essential as food and water. He quotes George Bernard Shaw: “The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity”.
When people feel seen, they blossom. When they feel invisible, they wither. This isn’t just poetry, it’s biology. Brooks cites research showing that infants who don’t receive responsive attention can suffer lasting emotional damage.
He introduces two categories that run throughout How to Know a Person:
- Diminishers: People who make others feel small and unseen. They stereotype, ignore, and treat others as tools rather than people.
- Illuminators: People who make others feel bigger, deeper, and respected. They shine “the brightness of their care” on others.
The goal of the book is to help readers become Illuminators.
How Not to See a Person
Brooks identifies several common obstacles to seeing others accurately:
- Egotism: Being too self-centered to try
- Anxiety: Having so much noise in your own head that you can’t hear others
- Naive realism: Assuming everyone sees the world the way you do
- The lesser-minds problem: Thinking you’re more complex and interesting than other people
- Objectivism: Treating people as data points rather than unique individuals
- Essentialism: Reducing people to stereotypes based on their group
- The static mindset: Refusing to update your understanding of someone as they change
These obstacles aren’t just intellectual failures, they’re moral failures. Brooks argues, drawing on philosopher Iris Murdoch, that “the essential immoral act is the inability to see other people correctly”.
Illumination: How to Really See Someone
So what does an Illuminator actually do? Brooks describes several qualities:
Tenderness: Deep emotional concern for another being. Brooks points to Rembrandt’s portraits as an example, paintings that show both the warts and the inner dignity of their subjects.
Receptivity: Overcoming your own insecurities and opening yourself to another person’s experience. It means resisting the urge to project your own viewpoint.
Active curiosity: Having an “explorer’s heart.” Brooks quotes novelist Zadie Smith, who as a girl would imagine what it was like to grow up in her friends’ homes: “I wanted to know what it was like to be everybody”.
Affection: Knowing someone with your whole body, not just your brain. In the biblical tradition, “knowing” can involve studying, having sex with, showing concern for, or entering into a covenant with someone.
Generosity: Seeing the best in people. Brooks tells the story of Dr. Ludwig Guttmann, who saw paraplegic patients not as “moribund cripples” but as “the best of men”, and went on to found the Paralympic Games.
A holistic attitude: Refusing to reduce people to a single dimension. Brooks quotes Tolstoy: “Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others”.
Accompaniment: The Art of Being Present
One of the most practical chapters describes “accompaniment”, the art of simply being with someone without trying to fix or direct them.
Brooks contrasts two ways of being present: the efficiency/optimization mindset (get in, get out, check the box) and the accompaniment mindset (ride alongside someone as they experience life’s ebbs and flows).
Key qualities of accompaniment:
Patience: Trust is built slowly. Brooks quotes philosopher Simone Weil on “negative effort”, the ability to hold back and wait.
Playfulness: People become more fully themselves when they’re at play. Brooks describes how deep friendships can form through shared activities like sports, dog training, or even just bouncing a baby on your chest.
Other-centeredness: Letting the other person lead. Brooks illustrates this with a story about his own failure as a baseball coach, he was so eager to share his “genius ideas” that he undermined the actual coach and created a subtle rivalry.
Presence: Just showing up. Brooks shares stories of professors and students supporting each other through grief, sometimes with no words at all, just presence.
What Is a Person?
This is where Brooks gets philosophical. Drawing on cognitive science, he argues that a person is a point of view.
Every person actively constructs their own perception of reality. We don’t passively take in the world, we build it moment by moment, based on our memories, expectations, and experiences.
Brooks cites neuroscientist Anil Seth: perception is “a generative, creative act” and “an action-oriented construction, rather than a passive registration of an objective external reality”.
This has profound implications for how we try to know others. If I want to know you, I can’t just observe you from the outside. I have to understand how you see the world, how you construct your reality.
Brooks illustrates this with the story of Emmanuel Carrère, who was vacationing in Sri Lanka when the 2004 tsunami hit. Each person in Carrère’s group experienced the same event completely differently, and Carrère’s own perspective was transformed by the experience.
Good Talks: The Art of Conversation
Brooks argues that getting to know someone is usually more about hearing than about seeing. A good conversation is “an act of joint exploration” where people float half-formed ideas and build on each other’s contributions.
His practical tips for better conversations:
- Treat attention as on/off, not a dimmer: Listen 100% or don’t pretend to listen at all
- Be a loud listener: Use verbal affirmations and facial expressions to show you’re engaged
- Favor familiarity: People love to talk about what they already know
- Make them authors, not witnesses: Ask for concrete details and emotional responses, not just abstract descriptions
- Don’t fear the pause: Wait before responding, the improv comedian’s rule is to listen all the way to the end, not just to the elbow
- Do the looping: Repeat what someone said to make sure you understood correctly
- Adopt the midwife model: Help others give birth to their own insights, rather than imposing yours
- Don’t be a topper: When someone shares a problem, don’t immediately jump in with your own story
The Right Questions
Brooks distinguishes between bad questions (closed, evaluative, vague) and good questions (open-ended, humble, curious).
Some of his favorite big questions:
- “What crossroads are you at?”
- “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”
- “If you died tonight, what would you regret not doing?”
- “Can you be yourself where you are and still fit in?”
- “What forgiveness are you withholding?”
Brooks notes that when he asks experts who ask personal questions for a living how often people tell them to mind their own business, the answer is almost always “almost never”. People are desperate to be asked about who they really are.
Part 2: “I See You in Your Struggles”
Hard Conversations
The second section addresses the messiness of real life: conversations across differences, across power inequalities, across pain.
Brooks shares a painful personal example, a panel discussion about the “culture war” with a Black intellectual who clearly saw him as “another clueless white guy” who couldn’t possibly understand her perspective.
Key lessons from this section:
- Every conversation has two levels: the official conversation (the words) and the actual conversation (the emotions being transmitted)
- Respect is like air: When it’s present, nobody notices; when it’s absent, it’s all anybody can think about
- Step into their “ken”: A Scottish word meaning the horizon of what someone can see. To have a good conversation, you have to step into the other person’s world
- Labeling kills conversation: Calling someone a “reactionary” or “woke” is a way to render them invisible
Brooks also draws on cognitive science to explain why people in different circumstances literally see different worlds. Psychologist Dennis Proffitt found that people with heavy backpacks see hills as steeper, people who’ve just consumed energy drinks see them as less steep, and fit athletes see them as barely steep at all.
“We perceive the world, not as it is but as it is for us.”
This is why hard conversations are so difficult, and so necessary.
How Do You Serve a Friend Who Is in Despair?
This is the most personal and devastating chapter in How to Know a Person. Brooks writes about his oldest friend, Peter Marks, who died by suicide in April 2022 after a long battle with depression.
Brooks describes Pete as “a rare combo of normal and extraordinary”, a handsome, athletic, kind man who became an eye surgeon, a devoted husband and father. But Pete was carrying more childhood pain than Brooks knew, and eventually “the trauma overtook him”.
Brooks shares what he learned from those agonizing three years:
- Don’t try to cheer the person up or offer advice. When you give a depressed person advice on how to get better, “all you are doing is telling the person that you just don’t get it”
- Don’t do “positive reframing” , it can make the sufferer feel even worse for not being able to enjoy things
- Just be there. “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”
- Send small touches. Brooks wishes he’d sent more emails and notes, just to let Pete know he was on his mind
- Don’t be afraid to ask about suicide. “The experts emphasize that you’re not going to be putting the thought into their head. Very often it’s already on their mind”
Brooks quotes Stephen Fry: “If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve to never ask them why… Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do”.
He also quotes his friend Nat Eddy: “Do whatever it is you can do to give the wives and children a break… Do whatever it is you do so you can look at yourself in the mirror. True friendship offers deep satisfactions, but it also imposes vulnerabilities and obligations”.
This chapter broke me a little. It’s raw, honest, and completely without easy answers.
The Art of Empathy
Brooks breaks empathy into three related skills:
- Mirroring: Accurately catching the emotion of the person in front of you. This involves reading facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice.
- Mentalizing: Figuring out why someone is experiencing what they’re experiencing. This involves using your own experience and memory to understand theirs.
- Caring: Getting out of your own experience and understanding that what someone else needs may be different from what you would need in that situation.
Brooks cites psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen’s empathy spectrum, which ranges from Level 0 (people who can hurt others without feeling anything) to Level 6 (people who are wonderful listeners, intuitive about others’ needs).
He offers practical ways to develop empathy:
- Contact theory: Bringing hostile groups together in the right structure (circles, shared goals) really does increase empathy
- Close observation: Actors like Viola Davis train themselves to notice “the minutiae of everything”, how someone puts their head down, how they eat, how they smile
- Reading literature: Complex, character-driven novels increase empathy skills in ways that plot-driven genre books don’t
- Emotion spotting: Using tools like the “mood meter” to develop “emotional granularity”, the ability to distinguish between similar emotions like anxiety, pressure, stress, and irritation
How Were You Shaped by Your Sufferings?
This chapter explores how people process trauma and grief. Brooks tells the story of Frederick Buechner, whose father died by suicide when Buechner was ten.
Buechner’s family dealt with the tragedy by sealing up, not talking about it, not crying, not processing it. But decades later, Buechner realized that “the trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed”.
Brooks outlines how people can help each other process trauma:
- “This Is Your Life”: Write a summary of the year from your partner’s point of view
- “Filling in the Calendar”: Walk through periods of someone’s life, year by year
- Expressive writing: Set a timer for 20 minutes and write about emotional experiences without worrying about punctuation or coherence
- Telling secrets: Share your story with trusted others
Brooks quotes Rabbi Harold Kushner, whose son died at 14: “I am a more sensitive person, a more effective pastor, a more sympathetic counselor because of Aaron’s life and death than I would ever have been without it. And I would give up all those gains in a second if I could have my son back”.
Part 3: “I See You with Your Strengths”
Personality: What Energy Do You Bring into the Room?
Brooks introduces the “Big Five” personality traits, the scientifically validated model that has replaced the discredited Myers-Briggs test.
Extroversion: Drawn to positive emotions, pleasure, and rewards. George W. Bush is the example, extremely extroverted, quick to eliminate distance between himself and others. But extroverts also take more risks and can be quick to anger.
Conscientiousness: Disciplined, persevering, organized. Predicts higher grades, career success, and longer life spans. But can lead to rigidity and workaholism.
Neuroticism: Responds powerfully to negative emotions, fear, anxiety, shame. Linked to higher rates of depression and stress disorders. But also makes people good at spotting threats and calling for change.
Agreeableness: Compassionate, considerate, helpful. Predicts lower divorce rates and better relationships. But doesn’t always lead to career success, people sometimes think agreeable people aren’t tough enough.
Openness: Motivated by new experiences and new ideas. Artists and poets are the quintessential examples. But people high in openness can find anything moderately familiar to be boring.
Brooks emphasizes that personality traits aren’t fixed, they can change over time, and people generally become more agreeable, conscientious, and emotionally stable as they age.
Life Tasks
Drawing on developmental psychology, Brooks outlines the major life tasks people face:
The Imperial Task (childhood/early life): Establishing a sense of agency. People develop a self-centered “imperial consciousness” focused on winning praise and achieving glory.
The Interpersonal Task (often adolescence): Establishing social identity. People develop the ability to think psychologically and experience others’ experiences.
Career Consolidation (young adulthood): Finding a vocation. People develop a more individualistic mindset and become better at self-control.
The Generative Task (midlife): Finding ways to serve others. People become guardians of institutions and mentors to the next generation.
Integrity vs. Despair (later life): Coming to terms with your life. People develop the ability to hold multiple perspectives and see connections between things.
Brooks notes that “human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished”.
Life Stories
Brooks argues that we all live by the stories we tell about ourselves. Psychologist Dan McAdams has spent decades collecting people’s life stories, and he finds that most people are eager, desperate, even, to be asked.
Key concepts:
- Imagoes: Archetypal roles we cast ourselves in, Healer, Caregiver, Warrior, Survivor
- Redemption stories: The common American narrative of overcoming adversity and emerging stronger
- Narrative flexibility: The ability to revise your story as life changes
Brooks encourages readers to ask others about their stories: “How did you come to believe X?” rather than “What do you think about X?”
How Do Your Ancestors Show Up in Your Life?
This chapter explores how culture shapes us. Brooks tells the story of Zora Neale Hurston, who grew up in Eatonville, Florida, an all-Black town with Black leaders. The stories she heard on the porch of Joe Clarke’s store became the raw material for her later work as a writer.
Brooks argues that we can’t understand a person without understanding their culture, but we also can’t reduce them to their culture. The challenge is to see both the group and the individual simultaneously.
He draws on research showing how culture affects perception:
⦿ Diplomats from high-corruption cultures accumulated over 100 parking tickets per diplomat during a five-year period when they could park illegally without fines; diplomats from low-corruption cultures got zero
⦿ People from “tight” cultures (where threats like disease and invasion were common) emphasize discipline and conformity; people from “loose” cultures emphasize individualism and creativity
⦿ People in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) cultures are outliers in world history, only 8% of societies have nuclear families as the dominant pattern, and only 15% have monogamous marriage as the dominant pattern
Brooks also writes personally about his Jewish identity: “I am an infidel Jew… Yet I know that I am a Jew in every fiber of my personality”.
What Is Wisdom?
Brooks concludes with a vision of wisdom that’s very different from the conventional image of the lofty sage dispensing advice.
Wise people, he argues, don’t tell you what to do. They witness your story. They create a safe space where you can navigate ambiguity. They help you process your own thoughts and emotions.
“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.”
How to Know a Person ends with Brooks’s honest self-assessment: he’s made a lot of progress, but he still has a long way to go. He still talks too much about himself, still misses crucial moments in conversations, still lets his ego take control.
But he’s trying. And that’s the point.
How to Know a Person Analysis
What Works
The personal vulnerability is the book’s greatest strength. Brooks isn’t writing from on high, he’s sharing his own failures and growth. His story about his friend Pete is devastating and necessary. It gives the book emotional weight that pure “relationship advice” books lack.
The breadth of sources is impressive. Brooks draws on neuroscience, psychology, literature, philosophy, and his own reporting. He’s read widely and synthesizes complex ideas accessibly.
The practical advice is genuinely useful. The conversation tips, the question suggestions, the empathy exercises, these are things you can actually use tomorrow.
The moral framework is compelling. Brooks argues that seeing others is not just a skill but a moral obligation. This gives How to Know a Person weight beyond self-improvement.
What Could Be Better
How to Know a Person can feel scattered. Some reviewers have noted that it starts strong but gets “muddled” in the middle. Brooks covers a lot of ground, and not all of it coheres perfectly.
The self-help framing might turn some people off. Brooks is an intellectual, not a therapist, and sometimes the book reads like a slightly more elevated version of the genre.
The religious language might alienate secular readers. Brooks writes about “souls” and draws on Christian theology in ways that some readers might find off-putting.
The political blind spots. Brooks is a centrist who sometimes seems to assume that good intentions and better conversations can bridge divides that are fundamentally about power and resources. His panel discussion about the “culture war” with the Black intellectual shows this tension, he wanted to analyze from a “detached” perspective while she was in the middle of a fight.
My Overall Feeling
How to Know a Person landed for me in a way I didn’t expect. I came to it as a skeptic, another self-help book from a New York Times columnist? But Brooks’s honesty about his own emotional limitations, his willingness to share his failures, and his genuine curiosity about other people won me over.
The chapter on depression and suicide is worth the price of admission alone. It’s the most honest thing I’ve read about what it’s like to try to support someone in that darkness.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths
Deeply personal: Brooks’s willingness to be vulnerable gives the book authenticity
Broadly sourced: Draws on psychology, neuroscience, literature, and philosophy
Practically useful: Concrete advice on conversations, questions, and empathy
Morally grounded: Argues that seeing others is not just a skill but an obligation
Timely: Addresses the epidemic of loneliness and disconnection with urgency
Well-written: Brooks is a skilled stylist who makes complex ideas accessible
Weaknesses
Structurally uneven: The book can feel like a collection of essays rather than a unified argument
Self-help framing: Might turn off readers who are skeptical of the genre
Religious language: May alienate secular readers
Centrist blind spots: Sometimes assumes good conversations can bridge fundamental power imbalances
Occasionally preachy: Brooks can’t quite resist the columnist’s impulse to pronounce
Comparison with Similar Works
How to Know a Person sits in a category with several other books about connection and understanding:
| Book | Focus | Similarities | Differences |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Art of Loving (Erich Fromm) | Love as a skill to be learned | Both argue that connection requires practice | Fromm is more philosophical, Brooks more practical |
| Daring Greatly (Brené Brown) | Vulnerability and shame | Both emphasize the importance of vulnerability | Brown focuses more on individual courage, Brooks on interpersonal skill |
| You’re Not Listening (Kate Murphy) | The lost art of listening | Both offer practical conversation advice | Murphy is more narrowly focused on listening; Brooks covers more ground |
| The Road to Character (David Brooks) | Moral development | Same author, similar themes | This book is more relational and practical; The Road to Character is more about individual virtue |
| Lost Connections (Johann Hari) | Depression and disconnection | Both diagnose a crisis of loneliness | Hari focuses on causes of depression; Brooks focuses on solutions for connection |
Brooks’s book is more personal and more practical than his earlier work. It’s less about abstract virtue and more about the daily practice of being present with others.
Conclusion
How to Know a Person is for anyone who’s ever felt invisible, and for anyone who wants to stop making others feel that way.
It’s for:
- Parents who want to truly see their children
- Partners who want to deepen their intimacy
- Managers who want to retain talented employees (Brooks cites a McKinsey study finding that employees leave because they don’t feel valued, not because of pay)
- Teachers who want to reach their students
- Anyone who’s ever walked away from a conversation feeling like they failed to connect
Brooks writes that “the quality of our lives and the health of our society depends, to a large degree, on how well we treat each other in the minute interactions of daily life”.
This book is a guide to those minute interactions. It won’t make you perfect, Brooks is honest about his own ongoing struggles. But it will make you more aware, more intentional, and hopefully, more human.
The book ends with a quote from W.H. Auden that captures its spirit:
“If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me.”
That’s the invitation. To be the more loving one. To see others deeply. To be deeply seen in return.
