How to See People
Genuine perception of another person requires suspending the efficient categorization that makes social life possible.
← Back to IdeasThe Default Mode
Humans are pattern-completion machines. We perceive the minimum necessary to classify—age, gender, role, threat level—then stop looking. This efficiency serves survival but produces blindness.
The result: we move through crowds of strangers, each reduced to their category, each invisible in their particularity. Even those we know well become fixed images, updated rarely.
The Alternative
To actually see someone requires deliberate effort against the efficient default. It means prolonged attention without purpose—looking longer than necessary, noticing details that serve no practical function.
This is uncomfortable. Sustained attention to another person feels like transgression. Social norms exist precisely to prevent it. We learn to limit eye contact, to glance rather than gaze.
Techniques
- Observation without interpretation: describe before explaining
- Attention to contradiction: where does the person not fit their category?
- Temporal awareness: how are they different from five minutes ago?
- Contextual imagination: what version of them exists that you will never see?
The Stakes
This is not merely a perceptual exercise. The failure to see people produces real consequences: mistaken judgments, missed connections, the slow erosion of empathy that makes cruelty possible.
The practice of seeing—deliberate, effortful, uncomfortable—is a corrective to the categorization that social efficiency demands. It cannot be sustained constantly. But it can be practiced deliberately, creating moments of genuine perception in a life of efficient blindness.