Vol. 5, Issue 2: The Other Side of the Coin
Jean-Paul Sartre's "others" and the gaze that can trap us or set us free
I’m an extrovert.
It’s who I am. It’s why I love conferences like CES. I love talking to people, asking questions, finding out about who they are and what makes them tick. I lean toward inclusion, not exclusion. I love moving through parties that are loud enough to have energy, but quiet enough to have conversations with people.*
*One thing I’m not, though, is super comfortable talking about myself. I nearly deleted that opening like 6 times
That’s just it. I love people. I wrote late last year that I’ve recommitted myself to a couple of things: bringing back the in-person interactions that the Internet and COVID robbed me of and wishing people a beautiful day when I finish my interaction with them. And I’ll say now, as I said then, it’s changed the flow of my day. It has changed how I looked at people and changed how they look back.
Jean-Paul Sartre is known for a lot of things. He’s a pretty pivotal figure in existentialist philosophy and if you’re my age and reading this, he was alive and doing his thing while you were toddling around in diapers, so he’s more “modern” than you think. But what he’s probably known for more than anything is a famous line from his 1944 play No Exit*: “L’enfer, c’est les autres” - “Hell is other people.”**
*If you haven’t read No Exit, it’s worth your time
**The Seinfeld version of this is an interaction between Jerry and Elaine, where she says, “I will never understand people” and Jerry looks up at her and says, “They’re the worst”
Hell is other people has been wrongly interpreted, misunderstood and meme-ified as “people are the worst” for so long that I’m probably swimming against a current that I’ll never catch up with in trying to work through this, but I’m here and as it says in the description of this thing: I think about things and then I write about them. So here we are.
The reality is that thinking of it that way hollows out the actual meaning, as Sartre himself later clarified:
But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell… when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves, we use the knowledge of us which other people already have… But that does not at all mean that one cannot have relations with other people. It simply brings out the capital importance of all other people for each one of us
This isn’t about hating people. It’s about what happens when we outsource our self-definition. In other words, the same social forces that constrain us are also the ones that make growth, meaning, and freedom possible. This is Sartre’s concept of “the gaze.”
When Sartre talks about the gaze, he talks about how other people see us as static, being seen, judged and then fixed in their minds as whatever they see in that moment. The net effect of that is that it can be impossible to break out of that mold. Anyone who started a job early in their career and stayed for years through life changes knows exactly what I’m talking about. You’re seen as who you were, not who you are, and that’s exactly what can prevent your growth in that organization.
We’re turned into the roles we play (job title, reputation) and versions of our worst moments and given expectations we didn’t choose. These become the work identity that calcifies, the social media algorithm that feeds us only Sabrina Carpenter or a family narrative that we can’t escape.
When you think about it like that, hell isn’t other people; it’s being trapped by how other people define us.
And when Sartre sat down with his biographer John Gerassi in 1971, he expanded on this. Sartre confirmed his quote, but also said “That’s only one side of the coin. The other side, which no one seems to mention, is also ‘Heaven is each other.’” He insists that both are true at the same time. Without others, for instance, we have no language, no system of shared values, no self-understanding.*
*We also wouldn’t have people who take their shoes off on airplanes, so it giveth and it taketh away
The mechanism doesn’t change. The outcome does.
Because we can survive on our own, but we thrive as a community. Think about all of the community you’ve built over time and how it’s helped you form and shape your worldview. Mentors who see the potential in us before we do. Friends who reflect our best selves back to us. Partners who hold us accountable. That’s the other side of the gaze. It’s the constructive gaze. It’s being recognized rather than reduced and being challenged rather than confined.
There’s risk in this type of openness, of course. Being seen fully requires a level of vulnerability that can leave you open to pain. But real growth happens between people, not in isolation and that means that paradise isn’t comfort. Paradise is truth. Paradise is friction. But most importantly, paradise is care.
The gaze is the gaze. It’s out there. It’s happening whether you want it to or not. You can’t escape being seen. But you do have choices. You can choose who gets proximity and access. You can choose whose feedback matters. You can choose the rooms you stay in. And those choices matter.
Through leadership, parenting, community, friendship, we’re constantly shaping hell or paradise for others. And as it says in the Bible “with great power comes great responsibility”* We are each other’s environment, so we all bear the responsibility of creating one that helps to nourish, not to deprive.
*This might be Uncle Ben in Spider-Man
Hell is other people, but that’s only one side of the coin … Heaven is also other people. Hell and Heaven are not opposites; they’re outcomes. The people around us don’t just influence our lives, they help author who we become. They help us create. They help us move through what can be a very confrontational and difficult world. But you can choose whose gaze you internalize.
The question isn’t whether other people matter (or whether they’re the best or the worst).
It’s whether we’re brave enough to show up and choose to be the right kind of people.
We haven’t done a “what I’m reading” section here in a while, so here’s a few interesting things:
Jeff Jarvis’s The Web We Weave about how we create a better internet by taking back control
Liar In a Crowded Theater by Jeff Kosseff about how we can combat the lying liars who take advantage of the First Amendment’s protection of lying
Derek Bayer on disconnecting from Big Tech
That’s all for this week, friends. Until next time.