Being alive is, among other things, a kind of incarceration. There you are, locked forever inside your own skin and soul, in a stupidly big universe that doesn’t give a rat’s ass. The only way to breach those walls is to connect with other sentient beings. The call and response of communication — verbal or otherwise — with people, animals or plants, assures you that you have been acknowledged and reacted to. It generates meaning, even if only in that moment. Love is one path to this freedom; but more than the exaltation of love, more than the validation of witness, people want to be understood, and understanding depends mostly on successful communication. So it’s a real bummer that most of us are rubbish at it.
Not so long ago, public communication belonged to those who held certain positions — government officials or journalists — or those who had sharpened skills — musicians or writers or artists. Now anyone with a phone and an internet connection is in control of his or her own self-expression on proliferating public platforms. I’m not suggesting that every dinner plate Facebook post or “lol” tweet is a howl into the existential void, though it might be. The point is, there’s an awful lot of self-expression going on, a global cacophony of voices seeking to understand and to be understood. And yet, going by the state of the world, we’re still lousy communicators. But that’s because talking constructively is the most difficult thing in the world.
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Possibly the most difficult hurdle to mutual understanding is intent. Reciprocity matters. If one of two parties isn’t all that interested in trying to understand the other, you only get frustration on one end and irritation on the other. Different intent doesn’t work either — for example one person bent upon banter and flirtation, the other trying to get a serious answer. But that’s just for starters.
You might indulge in, or experience, manipulation — a mostly benign sort, dealing in mixed signals and half-truths. The other person might channel the stoic soldier while their body language plays helpless victim. You might seduce your listener into taking the position you want them to take, but only by deliberately withholding relevant information.
There’s competitive, martial instinct. Theoretically I want to understand you, but my emotional defences are so high that I will dig into my own position and defend it to the death, treating it like the end position rather than as a starting point. I will treat anything you say as artillery shelling, and should any of it poke a hole in my walls, I’ll just doggedly plaster it back up instead of acknowledging that my walls don’t stand up to scrutiny.
There’s deflection, which merely uses the issue at hand as a springboard, to broach something that you would much rather broach, leaving the other person on a different conversational planet. There’s degeneration. One minute you’re talking about what you’re talking about, and the next minute you’re talking about how you’re talking about it, and I don’t like your tone. This can quickly become the bane of an intimate relationship. The oldest, fastest escalation of hostilities consists of the words “you always” or “you never” — from there it’s just a hop, skip and jump to an ad hominem attack.
And, importantly, there’s the other half of the communication arc that seems most in trouble today: reception, aka listening. That comes with its own set of problems: you might hear something quite unintended, by virtue of your personal context. Maybe the other person is more, or less, articulate than you can deal with. Maybe you’re a bit deaf and just didn’t catch something. Maybe you zoned out. Maybe you’re politely waiting for them to stop spewing words so that you can get back to spewing your own. Maybe you’re just not that interested in their version of truth.
When you think about all the obstacles in the way of communication, mutual understanding seems woefully unlikely. There’s only so much you can do with your own limitations, even if you are genuinely interested in otherness. It’s a difficult, staccato process that sometimes makes you want to clock someone with a kitchen utensil. But it helps to remember that that’s the only — limited, imperfect, perhaps temporary — way to break out of the prison of your self.