What’s the purpose of life? The question is annoying and contingent and probably unanswerable, but it’s also important and vital and guides our actions. I’ve been thinking about the purpose of life lately, for obvious reasons related to me prematurely dying, and my answer is congruent with the Brooks answer: life is about other people and our relationships—defined broadly—to them. Okay, if that’s the answer then can we be dismissed and go home to watch TV? Probably not, because the answer demands more elaboration, though most of us sweep it under the rug sometime in our late teens or early 20s and prefer not to revisit it, as if it’s an elderly relative who is no longer really here.

The “What’s the purpose of life?” question is not only annoying but also frequently uncomfortable, since it foregrounds the end, which is, at current technological levels, inevitable. We don’t like the question because we don’t want to ask: are we living up to our potential? Are we achieving our purpose(s)? If the answer is “no,” it’s comforting to ask other, less important questions, like who won the game last night. We can’t always be asking the big questions. Often, we have to be asking: “What’s for dinner tonight, and who’s going to make it?” But we should sometimes ask them, and try to answer.

If our everyday actions are incompatible with what the purpose of our lives ought to be, that argues for course correcting. Course correcting is hard, too, relative to continuing to do what we’re already doing. I’m guilty of coasting because it’s easy. I’m also guilty, though, of a certain fondness for both absurdity and excessively avoiding banalities, both of which lend themselves to not only thinking about hard, unanswerable things, but sorting people in those who are like me and those who are repelled by me. Lately I’ve been dying of squamous cell carcinoma, and when casual acquaintances or distant almost-friends have asked how I am, I’ve tended to answer: “I’m dying; how about you?” (Bess has an essay on this that she’s been noodling around on for a while). Maybe casually and sunnily saying that I’m dying makes me anti-social. Maybe it makes me pro-social. There’s a more serious point lurking beneath the dark humor, though: Let’s skip the small talk and get at something real, whatever “real” means. I don’t wholly know what it means but I often see what it doesn’t mean.

David Brooks’ book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen has an answer about the purpose of life that I more or less agree with, albeit with some caveats and some noticing-of-omissions: he writes that, for a lot of us, the purpose of life is to know other people (and to find the love of a good woman, or perhaps good women, depending). In saying that the purpose of life is other people, Brooks is pushing against the flow of American society, which is becoming lonelier and more disconnected from others than it was a few decades ago:

“The percentage of Americans who said they have no close friends quadrupled between 1990 and 2020. In one survey, 54 percent of Americans reported that no one knows them well. The number of American adults without a romantic partner increased by a third.”

Why are we lonely and prone to suicide? Lots of reasons, presumably, and Brooks says we need not just other people but the specific skills to connect with other people:

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.

Brooks also says: “These are some of the most important skills a human being can possess, and yet we don’t teach them in school. Some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of life.” I find myself agreeing, and yet it seems that most people don’t agree with Brooks or me, or we’d see more change and less loneliness.

Revealed preferences show most, or many, people prefer the problems of loneliness to the problems of connection and relationship. Given the data, maybe loneliness is a symptom of large-scale learned helplessness; unhappiness and isolation begets more unhappiness and isolation as the modern status-quo. Technology also makes being alone relatively more fun than it was, say, 30 years ago, which may push people towards not cultivating the weak social ties that eventually become close friends, lovers, and confidants. Facebook, however, is not going to help you when you need it most—but Facebook also isn’t going to demand help of you. Real connection means reciprocity, which is bidirectional, and it seems a lot of us can’t be bothered.

What would a “social skills” class like the one Brooks implicitly mentions would look like? Maybe it would use How to Know as a textbook. Humanities classes are supposed to in part be social skills classes, but a lot of them have instead become political-indoctrination classes.

Brooks’ comment about how we don’t teach social skills in school is a bit of a throwaway line, but I glommed onto it. Schools are a big topic for Brooks, with the word “school” appearing in some form 65 times over about 85,000 words,* and they’re frequently criticized: “Our schools and other institutions have focused more and more on preparing people for their careers, but not on the skills of being considerate toward the person next to you.” He also says: “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.” It seems like most people are telling themselves some kind of story about their life, though it’s frequently more flattering to the main character than a third-party author might be. Sometimes, though, it’s less flattering: thus the people with inferiority complexes, anxiety, and so forth. If you know of a curriculum for crafting accurate and coherent life stories, let me know. I suspect that “crafting a life story” is a skill that probably is taught, to an extent, though many don’t recognize it. Humanities classes are, or might have been, the place for this, but reading seems to be in decline relative to video. Fiction, in which the reader follows a narrative, is ignored for low-cohesion social media soundbites.

Brooks says that for centuries “schools really did focus on moral formation,” and now they don’t, and that’s bad. I’m still not convinced empathy is such a keenly moral act, but if Brooks asserts that it is enough times, maybe that’s convincing.

There are two important types of people in Brooks’ typology, “Diminishers” and “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.

Being an Illuminator is probably better, but what if you’re an Illuminator interacting with a Diminisher, or a narcissist, or an energy vampire, or a bloviator, or one of any number of other common anti-socials? There’s a risk of giving and giving, but a person who is a social black hole will simply keep taking and give little back. Prefer being an Illuminator, yes, but be ready to protect yourself. The kinds of people Brooks seems to know are sharper and more interesting than the average person (“I have a theory that my friend Michael Lewis has been able to write so many great books because he’s just so damn likable that people will divulge anything simply to keep him hanging around”), which likely raises the rewards of being an Illuminator. The world has its share of boring people.

I’ve encountered them. I just did last week in an Uber: the driver seemed friendly and garrulous, so Bess and I tried to chat with him. But he was insensate to those around him, and instead monologued on how he’d “been all over the world” (a phrase he must’ve used half a dozen times in twenty minutes), how much he loves football, how much his Italian wife loves shopping, and so forth. He seemed to want to impress us. I told him that I was dying and he responded by saying that Florence is beautiful. His favorite food is steak. His Italian wife loves shopping, he said a couple more times, in case I guess I’d forgotten the first few times. Seeing other people and illuminating them is good, but I also want to reserve my illumination for people who want to illuminate back. It’s hard to play a game of catch with one person. To be fair, Brooks has met guys like our Uber driver: “Maybe I bring this out in people, but I often find myself on the receiving end of what the journalist Calvin Trillin calls bore bombs.” He’s received, and he’s witnessed others receiving:

Down the bar there was a couple gazing deeply into their phones. Right next to me was a couple apparently on a first date, with the guy droning on about himself while staring at a spot on the wall about six feet over his date’s head. As his monologue hit its tenth minute, I sensed that she was silently praying that she might spontaneously combust, so at least this date could be over. I felt the sudden urge to grab the guy by the nose and scream, “For the love of God—just once ask her a question!”

When Bess edited this essay, she put in a comment: “I’ve been on this date. I once got up partway through a date, told him that we just weren’t a good match, and ran off. I couldn’t take another second.” I wonder what her date thought. Bess guesses that he probably kept thinking about himself, which he’d been excelling at all evening. There’s a funny moment in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities when the assistant district attorney Larry Kramer is on an illicit date with a beautiful juror from one of the cases he prosecuted. They’re about to go to bed, and “He [Kramer] wondered what was going through her mind at this moment. In fact, she was thinking about the way men are in New York. Every time you go out with one, you have to sit there and listen to two or three hours of My Career first.” Kramer is a monologuer, but I guess his date lacked Bess’s intolerance for social idiocy.

The world is full of missed opportunities. I feel them more keenly than I used to, because I can’t speak normally, which means that normal chitchat that can turn strangers into friends is a lot harder for me. Maybe lots of us don’t learn to seize these opportunities; supposedly, “We Now Need College Courses to Teach Young Adults How to Make Small Talk” (wsj, $). That could be a bogus trend story—but it might not be. I can’t tell. It’s hard to imagine that spending four plus hours a day staring a phone has no effect on in-person social skills.

I’m perhaps abnormally sensitive to good conversational skills because I was raised in an environment without them. Whatever conversational and social skills I have, I’ve had to learn synthetically, which makes me sympathetic to a book that is about doing the thing I was bad at for so long. I highlight comments like: “A good conversation is not a group of people making a series of statements at each other. (In fact, that’s a bad conversation.) A good conversation is an act of joint exploration.” Good conversation is so tentative; it’s easy to mess up and miss, and a lot of us never get in the practice of having them. A lot of good conversation exists in the liminal space between the boredom of things one already knows and the boredom of things one lacks the knowledge to comprehend. Stated more simply, if you already know it, it’s boring. If you can’t understand it, it’s boring. Good talks are the vegetable in the middle of the boring sandwich. There’s a kind of interestingness-frontier that good conversation finds and where good conversation lives. But we’re systematically skewed against good conversation:

In modern society, we generally refrain from asking the kinds of big questions I’ve just laid out. I guess we’re afraid of invading people’s privacy, afraid that the conversation will get too heavy. It’s a legitimate concern. But I’ve found in almost all cases that people are too shy about asking questions, not too aggressive. People are a lot more eager to have deep conversations than you think.

And are the ones who aren’t eager to have deep conversations worth talking to? Or are they likely to be the bore bombers? The conversational terrorists, putting us to sleep? One can perhaps generate fun conversations through games like Cards Against Humanity, or through Askhole cards (tagline: “That’s a nice social boundary you’ve got there. Would be a shame if something… happened to it).

Instead of deep conversations, it’s easy to default into lame team sports: “According to research by Ryan Streeter of the American Enterprise Institute, lonely people are seven times more likely than non-lonely people to say they are active in politics. For people who feel disrespected and unseen, politics is a seductive form of social therapy.” But it’s bogus. Politics is usually a form of shopping; a brand wants you to make the brand part of your identity so that you buy more. The same is true of political identities, with “donate” and “vote” substituted for “buy.” As with retail identification, most people, myself included, lack the wherewithal to fully see what’s happening, or to counteract it if we do. Make the brand or political party a part of your identity, and you’ll “buy” for life.

I’m guessing that few of us approach the end and say, “You know, I wish I’d spent more time on partisan political posturing.” Politics is, ideally, a way to deal with free-rider problems, allocate resources effectively, and so forth. Yet it seems increasingly to be a struggle for recognition and status—things that are too nebulous and tenuous for the political process. For most people, politics are unimportant, and we can’t substantively affect outcomes anyway, so why bother? Brooks’ answer: “We’re lonely.” We’re lonely, and we can’t face why, so we again look for the easier answer, until we can’t anymore. As Brooks says: “The awareness of death tends to make life’s trivialities seem…trivial. ‘Cancer cures psychoneuroses, one of Irvin Yalom’s therapy patients told him. ‘What a pity I had to wait till now, till my body was riddled with cancer, to learn how to live.’” Well, that’s sure germane to me, now, and I get it. I’ve asked friends and family for a “moratorium on banalities:”

For me, right now, the good days are the ones I get to spend with Bess, and the ones I—or more often both of us—spend writing (we are each other’s ideal readers). The bad days are ones when I let the feeling of obligation guide me, or when I let up on what I’ve called the “moratorium on banalities,” or ones when I give up and don’t try to be generative. Either fortunately or through the direction of will, I’ve had few days when I’ve given up and not tried to be generative. Some days, I’ve been legitimately too tired or sick to act: recovery after the May 25 surgery took a long time. Chemotherapy is brutal and debilitating. A medication called olanzapine inadvertently made me sleep for like 14 hours, and then left me feeling like a zombie for days.

Banalities are a kind of defense against true knowledge, in the same way an avoidant attachment style is defense. What’s left for me to be socially defensive against? Soon, the social game will be over for me. It’s already half over; my speech is that of a half quack, with many syllables dropped or mangled. Unless someone really wants to pay close attention, I can’t communicate effectively at all via speech. The conversations I’m having are the substantive ones, because those are the ones that make me, and ideally whoever else I’m around, feel and be most alive. We’re having the conversations that are worth the activation energy it takes for me to speak and for them to listen (and vice versa). We’re all answering the “What makes a good life?” question, as I said in the intro, and part of a good life is understanding what apparent trivialities are unimportant and should be ignored. Some apparent trivialities are important—doing anything well means mastering details—but not all are. Mastering the details early, as a means of demonstrating mutual interest, also has a relational payoff later: now I can focus only on what’s most important in relationships.

In reading How to Know, I had too many moments of uncomfortable self-recognition:

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.

That was me, for a long time. Being partnered with a woman who comes at relationships in quite the opposite matter was confusing at first. Although everyone probably avoids some of the hard parts of their relationship, Bess has an attachment style that can best be described as “relentless.” Not in a co-dependent way, but in a way that saw past my avoidance to what was underneath, which was both love and fear of love. Did this cause a struggle between us for a while? Sure. But we’re otherwise uncommonly compatible, which is hard for a pair of weirdos, and we both wanted the connection. Attaching yourself to someone who rejects you makes you a stalker.** Attaching yourself to someone who loves you, and who is learning to express it securely because it wasn’t safe to do so in childhood, is different. There are things Bess fails to see in herself—great things!—that I’ve tried to illuminate for her. There are things that Bess has seen in me that she’s successfully illuminated as well (okay, Bess and psychedelics)—things I might have otherwise not bothered to shine a light on until it was too late. There is another world in which I followed my childhood training and proclivities into the void. Without Bess’s aid I would have died after losing my tongue.

Despite liking How to Know’s overall thrust, there are a lot of “wait, really?” moments, like:

• “Psychologists are trained to see the defenses people build up to protect themselves from their deepest fears.” Are psychologists really trained to do that? Is the training effective? How does it work? What do “defenses” mean here? Is there a way of disproving this thesis, or, like so many ideas in psychology, is it not falsifiable?

• Or: “The humanities, which teach us what goes on in the minds of other people, have become marginalized.” That’s an idealized view: today, the humanities are more likely to teach radical-chic politics and political correctness, not what goes on in the minds of other people. Students avoid them for good reason. There’s a lot of motte-baileying going on with defenses of the humanities. Personally, I’d vote for a de-politicized humanities that focus on the human condition, rather than grievance politics, but I’m one guy and can’t individually make that happen.

• Or: “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.” Is that the one skill? Are there others? I think there might be others.

• Or: In this age of creeping dehumanization, I’ve become obsessed with social skills: how to get better at treating people with consideration; how to get better at understanding the people right around us.” Do we live in an age of creeping dehumanization? Relative to what? How do you measure dehumanization? There’s a lot of assertion relative to evidence in that phrase. I’d argue that the Soviet Union was a lot more dehumanizing, given its murder of tens of millions of people, than most regimes today, for example. The Soviet Union, or Maoist China, didn’t exhibit creeping dehumanization; both regimes and both eras were a tsunami of dehumanization.

• Or: “I’m breaking out these Diminisher proclivities to emphasize that seeing another person well is the hardest of all hard problems.” The hardest? Really? Harder than understanding consciousness itself? Harder than curing cancer? Harder than building cost-effective mass transit in the United States? There are harder problems out there—a lot of them. Seeing another person well is an important problem, and one that many of us have, but the hardest? No.

• Or: Brooks quotes a psychiatrist named Iain McGilchrist as saying “Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being.” A moral act? I’m not so sure. A positive, prosocial act in most cases, maybe, but “moral?” Attention is finite and I guess giving away finite resources can be good, but what if you’re giving attention where you shouldn’t? And he believes it: “Being an Illuminator is a way of being with other people, a style of presence, an ethical ideal.” Are we sure it’s an ethical ideal in itself?  Sociopaths and charming abusers may be talented Illuminators who weaponize their Illumination skill. Using it to understand another person may be a sort of moral ideal, but wielding it to manipulate isn’t. Ascribing moral value to attention, instead of outcome of that attention, is like conflating beauty with goodness. 

Like many Brooks generalities, some which have a fortune-cookie quality, there are a lot of unexplored exceptions. Then there is the obvious, like: “different people can experience the same event in profoundly different ways.” Besides the obvious, we also sometimes get some inscrutable statements that seem un-evaluable, like “Every epistemology becomes an ethic.” Is ChatGPT hallucinating again? 

Overall, I agree that it’s good to know and see another person (it’d be peculiar if I spent 4,000 words arguing that it’s bad to know and see another person), but the people who most need to know and see another person are probably not reading How to Know. Brooks cites a study—I wonder if it replicates—examining “how accurate people are at perceiving what other people are thinking,” and he mentions that some people are reasonably good at this task. But “The problem is that people who are terrible at reading others think they are just as good as those who are pretty accurate.” It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect, but for empathy and social skills. Probably there are some people on the margin who read it and experience an epiphany, but many, compared to the number who read it, need it and will never get it. I know some of those people—too many, maybe. Reading How to Know, I was tempted to send copies, but then I thought: “This isn’t going to work,” and I worried about something else.

Think about other answers to the “What’s the purpose of life?” question. “Science and improving the human condition” also seem like solid answers. But I think science, technology, and company building are compatible with knowing other people—they’re team sports. Hardly anyone does it alone. In pursuing scientific and technical questions, we often end up coming to intimately know other people pursuing the same questions: so many roads lead back to knowing another person. Doing something with someone is often a better way of getting to know them than just talking to them. Pick a project, whatever it might be, and do that thing. It can be simple, like making dinner. It can be complicated, like launching a startup. Bess and I are working together on writing projects, and so we’re coming to know each other more, and it’s possible to come to know each other more even after 15 years together. We’re still developing, growing, trying new things. Stasis is death. Working on a project with someone also means that their feedback holds a mirror up to you, so you come to better see and know yourself. When I’m working with Bess, though, I most want to come to know her better.

If Illuminating people is a skill, then like any skill it should be practice-able. What do you do to better know other people?

If you’ve gotten this far, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding ongoing care. Plus, think about subscribing to receive posts by email.

---

* “Honor” in some form gets hit 15 times, although two reference Honoré de Balzac.

** A stalker, yes, and also someone who is a more interesting protagonist in a novel.