The short answer:

Only if you realize it’s impossible.

The long answer:

I like brain teasers as much as anybody, which is to say not very much. Luckily, I’m old enough that I’m not asked many anymore, plus I’ve already heard them all anyway. (Spoiler: it’s a polar bear, they’re triplets, and the doctor is the boy’s mother.) But there is one good thing about brain teasers, and that is that they have answers. They are meant to be figured out. If I were the type that liked brain teasers, I would know that if I just thought about it long enough, eventually I’d come up with the answer. After all, let’s be honest, I am that clever.

On the other hand, people are not meant to be figured out. If anything, it is the opposite. Conception is basically nature’s way of creating the impossible brain teaser. Just ask any parent who doesn’t know why their baby is upset. If you can’t figure out a baby, what hope do you have of figuring out a grown-up?

But this does not mean that people do not try. The entire field of psychology is devoted to trying to figure people out. However, I can confidently say that no one has yet succeeded in this goal, because if they had, then there would be no more psychologists. Like any brain teaser, as soon as that person told someone else the answer, that person would slap himself for being so blind, and then seven minutes later, everyone on the Internet would do the same.

Of course, people still try to figure other people out. I’m not sure why, but I guess that’s just part of the puzzle. Maybe it’s because it seems easy. After all, you do have in common that you are both people, and shouldn’t that be enough?

It isn’t. It’s tempting to think that you can justify someone else’s behavior using logic. Perhaps you have been in a similar situation, or perhaps you have read scientific studies on the subject. But people do not always behave logically, they are influenced by experiences that you do not know about, and their actions sometimes belie their beliefs. They have been developing their personality for their entire lives just to thwart people like you.

People are always more complicated than you think. Sometimes I think we forget this. There’s a tendency to simplify people to make them more understandable. To some degree this is necessary, because otherwise we would never be able to describe someone to anyone else in a sentence or two. But then it’s easy to start thinking that that sentence or two defines that person, and that just doesn’t do them justice.

I tend not to remember compliments because they can sometimes be sort of meaningless, but I do remember what I think is the greatest compliment anyone ever gave me. And it’s strange because I don’t think she would remember saying it or even think that it was a compliment, but here it is. She said I was “very nontrivial.” It isn’t even a compliment, is it? True, no one would want to be called trivial, but being nontrivial doesn’t seem that special.

However, even though I think we all know that no one is trivial, sometimes I think we forget it. When we don’t know someone very well, we tend to say things like, oh, she’s just one of those artsy girls, or he’s just a sciency guy. But by doing so, we’re basically trivializing them; we’re lumping them into the large group of people that we would describe using the same sentence. It’s easy to forget sometimes that that’s an oversimplification, that nobody is trivial. There is always more to people than you think, more to figure out.

So what did it mean to me to be called nontrivial? It meant that she knew that there was more to me than others might realize. It meant that even though she may have known me fairly well, she also knew that there was more to me than she could have hoped to figure out. Sometimes if I’m feeling lonely, I think that nobody really knows me that well, that all they think is that I fall into some broad, trivial category, and when that happens, I start thinking to myself, well maybe they’re right, maybe I am just trivial. So to have someone tell me that I’m “very nontrivial,” well, it’s not as trivial as it seems.

So should you try to figure people out? Only if you realize that there’s no way you will succeed. But if your goal is just to see how nontrivial they can be, well, then by all means go for it.

Cheers,
-qm