There is a phrase that has always landed strangely with me.
"I'm proud of you."
Family members, friends, colleagues, and mentors have said it to me, always with kindness, always meant as encouragement. I have never doubted the sincerity behind it. And yet each time I hear those words, something in me quietly stalls.
What exactly are you proud of? The version of me you've observed, the accomplishments you've witnessed, the story you've stitched together from scattered moments? Or the person you haven't really taken the time to know?
Knowing another human being is astonishingly difficult. It asks more of us than observation or admiration or proximity. It asks for curiosity. It asks us to pose questions we don't already know the answers to, to listen without drafting our reply, to let another person's inner world stay larger than our assumptions about them.
Without that, I wonder what our pride is actually attached to.
Often, I think, what we call pride is admiration for outcomes. The diploma, the promotion, the championship, the scholarship, the title, the award. The visible evidence that someone has become what our culture recognizes as successful. But those are only the outward expressions of a life, and they tell us remarkably little about the person living it. The fears that stayed hidden. The grief carried in silence. The loneliness concealed behind competence. The small acts of courage no audience witnessed. We rarely become proud of those things, because we rarely become curious enough to discover them.
We become proud of performances while remaining strangers to the performer.
That distinction has gotten harder for me to ignore.
I have attended funerals after someone died by suicide. Again and again, I have listened as people lovingly recounted accomplishments. Athletic achievements, academic excellence, leadership positions, talent, potential, promise. Every milestone that made everyone so proud. These remembrances come from genuine affection. I don't question that. But I cannot help wondering whether they also reveal something about us. How much of this person's life did we actually know? Did anyone get deeply curious about the weight they were carrying while they kept succeeding? Or did we admire what could be measured and overlook what could only be understood through relationship?
Those are uncomfortable questions, not because they accuse anyone, but because they include all of us.
I remember a community discussion after a screening of a film about a young person who died by suicide. A panel of thoughtful professionals reflected on what everyone in the audience must surely be feeling. The sadness, the grief, the lessons, the need for greater awareness. Everything they said was well-intentioned. But no one asked the audience what they had actually noticed. No one invited the possibility that dozens of people watching the same story might have walked away with dozens of different truths. The conversation arrived carrying answers before it had gathered any questions.
I've started noticing that pattern well beyond conversations about suicide. In education, in leadership, in politics, in organizations, in families, even in love. We become remarkably certain about one another. We decide who people are, what motivates them, what they need, how they must feel. Our certainty grows much faster than our understanding.
Maybe that is one of the quiet tragedies of modern life. We have become extraordinarily skilled at evaluating one another and far less skilled at discovering one another. Our institutions reward certainty. Our cultures celebrate confidence. Our media amplifies conclusions. Curiosity, meanwhile, asks us to slow down, to remain unfinished, to admit that another human being is more mysterious than our categories can contain.
I think this is why I've always struggled with the language of pride. Not because pride is wrong, but because I suspect there is something deeper. What if, before telling someone "I'm proud of you," we first became genuinely curious about who they are? What if the greatest gift we could offer one another was not admiration but attention, not applause but presence, not evaluation but wonder?
I suspect many of us spend our lives trying to become someone worthy of another person's pride. And maybe what we've actually been longing for is simpler than that. To be seen without performance. To be known beyond achievement. To be accompanied rather than assessed. To have someone stay curious long after everyone else has decided who we are.
Civilizations are shaped not only by what they celebrate but by what they choose to notice. If that's true, then curiosity isn't merely a communication skill or a leadership trait. It might be one of the purest expressions of love.
Pride applauds what it can see. Curiosity seeks what it can't. And I've come to believe the second asks more of us, and gives more back.