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These articles were excerpted from Tapestry, a weekly newsletter that examines the arts and entertainment world in Charlotte and North Carolina.

David Brooks searches for a deeper connection

Author and New York Times columnist David Brooks comes to Charlotte on Oct. 30, 2024, to talk about his new book "How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen."
Queens University
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Author and New York Times columnist David Brooks comes to Charlotte on Oct. 30, 2024, to talk about his new book "How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen."

David Brooks is a lot of things. He’s a best-selling author, a columnist for the New York Times, and a regular commentator for the PBS NewsHour. But one thing he says he wasn’t always was a person with the ability to connect deeply with others.

"I think the chief skill that anybody can have is the ability to make (others) feel seen, heard, respected and understood," he said. "I, personally, am not a socially adept person. So, I thought if I wrote a book about the subject, I could make myself get a little better at this skill."

His new book is “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen," and Brooks is coming to Charlotte next Wednesday, Oct. 30, to discuss the book at Queens University.

Brooks spoke with WFAE's Nick de la Canal, and said he wrote the book, in part, for himself, but also in response to ongoing societal changes in the U.S.

Nick de la Canal: Is this something that you’ve been thinking about for a while? Or was this just over the last few years, seeing society in its current form, that got you wanting to write about this?

David Brooks: You know, when I look back over the books I’ve written so far, they all follow a pattern. They’re basically an attempt by a guy to take a recently asocial, shallow guy and try to make him into an emotionally intelligent adept guy -- and a deeper guy. And so, you know, I wrote a book about moral formation called “The Road to Character.” I wrote a book about emotion called “The Social Animal.” I wrote a book called “The Second Mountain” about spiritual improvement. So basically I'm working out my weaknesses in public.

De la Canal: So you make the argument that, as a society, we need to do a better job of seeing and hearing each other -- because in the absence of that is loneliness, which can have some really bad effects.

Brooks: Yeah, I mean, we’re just in a moment of societal breakdown where the number of people without a romantic partner is up by a third. Thirty-six percent of Americans say they’re persistently lonely. And so, we've become sadder. And when you become sadder as a society, you become meaner. And so a lot of the populism in our politics, I think, flows from a sense that people feel their society’s contempt for them. They don’t see them. They’re invisible.

De la Canal: Yeah, you wrote that lonely people are seven times more likely to become involved in politics.

Brooks: Yeah, I think a lot of our political dysfunction flows from the state of our culture and the broken social relationships. So if you’re lonely, and you feel disrespected, politics is a very tempting form of therapy. Because politics gives you the illusion that you belong. You’re on team red or team blue. Politics gives you the illusion that you’re doing something morally good for the world, but all you’re really doing is screaming at the TV, and we end up making ourselves even more miserable than we were.

De la Canal: You know you hear a lot of people say that the older you get, the harder it is to make new friends. Do you think that that’s true? And if so, like, how do you get around that?

Brooks: I think it may be true socially, but it doesn’t have to be true. I teach a class at the University of Chicago for people between the ages of 45 and 75, and it’s 'How should they think about the remaining third of their life?' And so you get a cohort of people in their 50s and 60s mostly. They move to Chicago for a year, and they become close friends with each other -- all 30 of them. So these are people in their mid-60s or 70s, and they’ve made 30 new best friends. And, so, if we’re not making friends in old age, it’s not because of anything biological or baked into our nature, it’s simply because we haven’t put ourselves in the circumstances where we’re going to meet the kind of people that we want to walk through life with.

De la Canal: So, how did you go about doing research for this book? And what were some of the solutions maybe you found to being able to connect with people in a better way?

Brooks: Yeah. Well, the most important feature of connecting with another and making them feel seen is being really good at conversation -- at what we’re doing right now. And so I went around asking conversation experts, 'Give me some tips on how to be a better conversationalist.' And some of them are things like, don’t be a 'topper.' So if you tell me, ‘Oh, I had this terrible flight. We were on the tarmac for two hours.’ My inclination is to say, ‘Oh, I know exactly what you’re going through. I was on a terrible flight, and we were on the tarmac for six hours.’ And it sounds like I’m trying to relate to you, but what I’m really saying is, 'Let’s stop paying attention to your inferior set of experiences, and let’s pay more attention to my superior set of experiences.' So don’t be a 'topper.' Another is treat attention as an on/off switch, not a dimmer. If you’re with somebody, pay a 100% of attention or zero. Don’t try to 60% it.

But the most important thing is asking good questions. Once I get to know somebody and establish trust, I try to ask questions that lift them out of their lives and get them to think about themselves in a new way. So if this five years is a chapter in your life, what’s the chapter about? If we met a year from now, what would we be celebrating? How do your ancestors show up in your life? Like, we’re all formed by our ethnic heritages, but how exactly do you think you’re formed by your ancestors? These are questions that get people to reflect on themselves, and they turn a mundane conversation into a much more interesting one.

De la Canal: You also write about a friend of yours who had depression and ultimately died by suicide. What did you learn from that experience?

Brooks: Well, I learned that I didn’t know how to walk with somebody who’s suffering from depression. And so I made a lot of classic mistakes that I now know are common when you’re trying to accompany someone through this terrible illness. And one of them is I tried to cheer him up by reminding him how good his life was. I would say, ‘You know you have a great marriage, your boys are amazing, you love your career.’ And all I was doing was making him feel worse -- because I was reminding him he wasn’t enjoying the things that were palpably enjoyable. I tried to give him ideas on how to get out of depression, to make it lift. And they were like, ‘You know, you used to take these service trips to Vietnam. Why don’t you do that again? You found it so rewarding.’ But all I was doing was showing that I just don’t get it. Because it’s not ideas that the people are lacking who are suffering from depression, it’s desire and pleasure and a lot of other things. So what I learned gradually over the three years that he suffered from this: First, just to acknowledge the reality of the situation. This sucks. This sucks. And try to get him to explain exactly what it feels like, how bad it is, so he won’t feel as alone in his suffering. The second is just to express some goodwill. I want more for you. And those words won’t change anything, but at least you’ve expressed some goodwill. And the third tip I wish I’d done more was just constant touches. A text here, a text there. Just, ‘I want you to know I’m still thinking of you.’ Because I think he was a little nervous that his friends would leave him because he wasn’t much fun to be around. But constant touches would just be a reminder of presence.

De la Canal: Do you think that writing this book has changed you in any way?

Brooks: Yeah, I think so. I think I’m a little more socially adept. I will say one thing -- when I’m on an airplane or a bus or a train, I’m much more likely to take my headphones out and have a conversation with the person next to me. There’s a whole bunch of research showing that we underestimate how much we’re going to enjoy talking to strangers. We underestimate how deep people want to go, and we underestimate just how fun and interesting other people can be if we ask them about their life story. I’ve had many, many, many more conversations on planes or buses or trains than I had before working on this book, and I’ve met a lot of people. Some of them are my cup of tea, some of them are not my cup of tea -- but they’re all interesting.

David Brooks will discuss his book "How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen," on Wednesday, Oct. 30, as part of the Queens University Learning Society.

Nick de la Canal is an on air host and reporter covering breaking news, arts and culture, and general assignment stories. His work frequently appears on air and online. Periodically, he tweets: @nickdelacanal