Don't ever tell me you know me. Like, how reckless of you to say something like that. “Oh, I know him very well.” Yeah right. No.
See, I don't take it upon myself to assume that I really know anyone, because people change. People evolve & they could be one version of themselves with you & another version with someone else. It's like a die with multiple sides & you never know which one you'll get on either roll.
It irks me when someone says something like this because of my view on people in general. True enough, it's mostly delivered with warm intentions & maybe even as a comfort. But to me, it's a statement of containment, a way of saying, I've solved the puzzle of you. I've read the book & I know how it ends.
It implies that I'm a static object or a finite data set that's been downloaded & processed. But this sentiment, however well-intentioned, I believe is built on a fundamental fallacy. It's a lie we tell ourselves to feel safe. The truth is that we can never truly “know” another human being, or ourselves, for that matter. The audacity required to claim such a thing is not only intellectually lazy but borderline offensive. Here's why.
The primary failure of this claim starts with the subject, not the observer. If you claim to know me, you assume that I know me. But here's another truth: there are days when I'm a stranger to myself. We like to imagine that we're the captains of our own ships, sailing the seven seas of consciousness. However, psychology suggests we're often merely passengers (don't worry, I won't get into free will; that's a subject for another essay).
But read this, the concept of the “Johari Window,” a map of regions of self-awareness, developed by psychologists Joseph Luft & Harrington Ingham.
It shows that while there are things we know & things we hide (& blind spots), there is a fourth quadrant: the “Unknown Self.” & these are aspects of our psyche (subconscious drives, repressed memories, latent potentials & so forth) that remain hidden from both the observer & the subject!
So if I'm driven by impulses I can't identify & reacting to chemical shifts in my brain that I can't even feel… how can an outsider claim to hold the map to my territory? I mean, you must be sailing eight seas!
Philosophy calls this the problem of qualia: the subjective, individual experience of existence. You can see me cry, you can understand the concept of sadness & empathize based on your own history. But you can't feel that specific texture of my grief. It's locked behind the wall of my own consciousness.
When someone claims to “know me,” they're typically projecting their own experiences onto a screen that happens to be shaped like me. They aren't seeing inside the room; they're looking at the reflection in the window.
What's more, the absolute arrogance of “knowing” someone ignores the relentless fluidity & passage of time. We tend to treat people like architecture. Once built, structures remain standing in a recognizable form into the foreseeable future. But we aren't buildings; we are rivers.
The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously stated, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” This is not just poetic metaphor; it's biological reality.
Neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to change, adapt, & reorganize itself throughout life) dictates that our brains are in a constant state of rewiring. Every conversation physically alters the neural pathways in our heads. We're shedding cells & generating new ones. We're gaining new scars & losing old memories.
The person I was six months ago is, quite literally, dead. He's been replaced by a successor who shares his name & SSN but possesses a slightly different set of fears/desires. When someone says, “I know you,” they are almost always referring to a past version of you. They're hugging a ghost. To claim to know me is to deny me the ability to evolve!
I can concede, however, that there is a distinction between knowing someone & predicting them. I think this is where the confusion is found. As humans, we are pattern-seeking survival machines. From an evolutionary standpoint, it's beneficial for us to predict the behavior of our tribe.
We observe habits, characteristics. We know that our friend gets grumpy when they're hungry, or that our partner withdraws when stressed. We collect this data & construct a mental avatar of the person. An archetype.
But we shouldn't confuse the map with the territory! Realizing my pattern isn't the same as knowing my soul. It's only a simple statistical analysis, nothing more. We mistake reliability for identity.
Just because I reacted with patience to a specific annoyance a hundred times doesn't mean I don't have a storm of rage brewing & waiting for the one-hundred-and-first time to break & go ballistic!
History is littered with the shattered perceptions of neighbors/spouses who claimed to “know” someone, only to be blindsided by an act of sudden violence or a breathtaking act of uncharacteristic kindness (but mostly violence or rage). The “predictable” human is a myth; we are all just one bad day or one profound realization away from becoming someone else entirely.
This brings us to the “audacity” I feel when defined by others. It's a sentiment that resonates with Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist concept of “The Look” (le regard).
Sartre argued that when we're alone, we're free subjects. But the moment another person looks at us, we become an object in their world, where we are categorized, sometimes judged & defined. To be “known” by someone is to be solidified into a thing or an archetype like I mentioned before. This is where you get the “nice guy,” the “troublemaker,” or the “shy introvert.”
This is why the phrase “I know you” feels so offensive to me. It's an act of reductionism! It strips us of our agency & complexity. It feels like a cage because it implies a limit to who we can be. If you “know” that I'm a certain way, then any deviation from that behavior is seen as “acting out” or “not being myself.”
But who determines what “myself” is? The observer becomes the gatekeeper of my identity. It's is a subtle power play & a way of saying, I have defined your parameters & you are not allowed to cross them. It's offensive because it simplifies the infinite complexity of human consciousness.
Ultimately, the desire to know someone is again, a desire for safety. We want to believe the people around us are constants in a variable world. But this is a delusion! We are mysteries crashing into other mysteries.
Perhaps we should retire the phrase “I know you” entirely. It's a dead end. Instead, we should strive for a dynamic state of witnessing. We should approach our loved ones not as books we have already read, but as unfolding events that we're lucky enough to watch.
True respect is not the arrogance of definition, but the humility of uncertainty. It's looking at a friend, a partner, or a child & saying, “I see who you are in this moment, but I am open to who you will become.” To release the need to know is to release the need to control. In that release, we might find something far more profound than knowledge: the freedom to let people be the strangers they truly are & to love them anyway.