Being seen in friendship and politics

Struggles with human connection

Feeling unseen

Humans’ survival has depended on their ability to form tribes. This is why ideology and political behavior are socially determined, and humans are exceptional at finding post hoc rationalizations for our group's actions or speech. Empathy, the ability to put oneself in another’s position, is essential to our success as a species and the foundation of our bonds.

I’ve noticed lately that we’re more willing to grant ourselves endless slack for our actions, accounting for the forces and motivations shaping them. We also are highly self-centered in our friendships, and I feel unseen by many of my own, so I’m writing this for others who may feel the same. I also connect it to politics below because friendship and politics have become inextricable (to the detriment of friendship). Today, a meditation. I have no particular conclusion for you.

Being seen in friendship

I’ve noticed that the content of conversations in my social contexts is much like this:

1. People take turns telling quotidian stories, often about dating, and there’s no engagement from the others in the group about any person’s words or any attempt to understand why they reached certain conclusions.

2. Complaints about work, life, and men.

3. Inane conversations about how we’re mindlessly entertaining ourselves.

I’m constantly looking for depth in conversation. I rarely find it, save for the friends I’ve recently made who also write, and I’m so grateful for them.

Imagine what it would be like to understand the other person truly. This means asking questions about their story or how they reached a particular conclusion. This practice deepens my connection and exercises my empathy, and it is the foundation for moving forward in a deeply divided society.

In his book How to Know a Person, David Brooks describes this process as the foundation of friendship. I didn’t love Brooks until recently. He’s not perfect, as no commentator is. He’s a boring-looking dude. But he writes books that will make you think.

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.¹

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. 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.²

Diving into virtue ethics and Indian philosophy has led me to understand the purpose of friendship differently. There’s a code of dharma for every relationship. Dharma has many meanings, but I’m referring to our duty toward the other person. The concept of boundaries today flies in the face of this dharma. It’s a selfish way to see friendship because it allows you to exit situations when a friend may need you the most. Boundaries sound reasonable, but in practice, they’re often used to get out of having a conversation or abdicating responsibility to be there for a person. A friend (A) recently told me she disagreed with a friend (B). A told B she wants to have a conversation. B said she’s hurt too and wants to speak her truth but needs A to not say anything in return, period. That’s the opposite of how a friend should behave in a conflict. The women in my life tend to be conflict-avoidant, and I’ve learned the same behavior. Boundaries, as we understand them today, allow a person to avoid difficult conversations when one may be needed to save the friendship.

Friendship is not merely about listening to complaints but requires helping each other grow. Without this mutual growth, one person will inevitably outgrow the other, as has happened to me with several friends of late. When you complain about a life situation to a friend, do they validate or challenge your interpretation? Mutual challenge between friends is required but is almost non-existent in female friendships because we are so conflict-averse and unwilling to admit we’ve wronged someone.³

Apologizing when you’ve hurt someone is imperative in my moral code. However, we’ve also learned socially never to admit when we’ve hurt someone because it would harm our sense of self as good people. Women have learned to value our sense of self as virtuous far more than actually trying to be righteous with our actions. I did this, too. I call this a problem specific to women’s culture because we socialize with each other to pursue status through moral signaling in a way I have not seen men do. In my estimation, this tendency is how we got a social justice culture. We’re less interested in encouraging each other to be better people and more in status games through stated beliefs rather than actions.

Often, being there means simply being present when someone is going through the downs of life, particularly death, unemployment, illnesses, and breakups. A tendency I’ve noticed concerning employment is that the people close to me distance themselves, while acquaintances are more willing to help. When a friend experiences death or illness, visiting with some home-cooked food can go a long way (from experience).

Is a friendship in which seeing isn’t reciprocal worth it? For me, it isn’t. And yet, it’s difficult just to let go of everyone and cut ties, even if this is true. I have always struggled with having ‘friends’ but feeling misunderstood by them most of the time. I’m not for everyone. I imagine some of you think something similar.

In many friendships with women, venting frequently dominates the conversation. And that is indeed a perfectly reasonable thing to discuss—we all have woes we need someone’s ear for. But those venting sessions can also become the sole purpose, something I’ve heard from several women. We all have to complain, but when we solely do that, we’re not being reciprocal and rather self-centered.

Friends should be nonjudgmental and give us feedback when we behave unreasonably or harm ourselves and others.

Being seen in politics

Since the election, I’ve been asking questions of people, especially those who went from Democrat voters to Trump. I’ve understood their depth of dissatisfaction.

Cutting someone off because of their political opinions indicates a dearth of empathy and compassion because it is usually done without understanding how the person reached a particular conclusion.

It should go without saying that, at this point, we handicap our critical thinking ability by living in echo chambers, as I see many people in my orbit doing. Hence, I feel distanced from them. After the election, I had several conversations with liberal women friends who voted for Harris. Not one asked me what I thought, so I’m incredibly grateful for all the thoughtful readers I’m lucky to have. If we have complex reasons for our votes, we should assume no less of others.

Bernie Sanders’s former campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, spoke with Ezra Klein recently about Bernism and how his politics were co-opted by symbolic capitalists in the Biden administration. Shakir explained that while Democrats may have had populist policies, the people they were aimed at were regarded with open disdain. Bernie successfully built a cross-partisan movement precisely because he deeply saw people in their struggles. He doesn’t come across as anything but a curmudgeonly old man. But the passion with which he tells people they’ve been cheated by a rigged system (correctly) makes them feel like he truly understands. I felt like he saw me.

The Biden administration adopted Bernieism's policies but rejected the imperative to see people in their struggles, so Harris lost. The policies were canceled out by rhetoric telling people to accept whatever scraps they were given in tax credits.

The reason I remain both angry and saddened by the rejection of Bernie is that he did what people think Trump does: understand them on a level Democrats never did. And this passion Trump deployed on behalf of working people, regardless of the truth of his statements, has won him a cult of personality. I understand it and empathize with people who decide that people who see them as lesser don’t deserve power. And those who refuse to see people’s inherent dignity indeed do not deserve power. I’ll repeat it: Trump voters are as worthy of dignity and respect as anyone else. Their decision is no less moral than a Harris vote, and we ought to be more nuanced in our understanding of morality in the first place. An attempt was made to extort votes, which was said to determine a person’s morality. Extortion is immoral.

In sum, one of my intentions this year is to find deeper friendships that challenge me intellectually. I recognize that most people aren’t looking for this solely. It is fair to assert that we have different friends who fulfill varying needs. However, I have one need: mutual growth through building better mental models about the complex topics that have bifurcated our society.

1. David Brooks, How to Know a Person, 216

2. Ibid., 73

3. I recognize we endlessly apologize, but those tend to be for things that don’t matter. When it matters, we avoid it.