Why is communicating with people so hard?
Plus, Sherlock Holmes is gay, why you shouldn’t correct your boss, and why so many writers go crazy.
Think back to a moment in your life where you were trying to explain something to somebody, and they just didn’t understand you.
You had some point that you wanted to make, and you felt like if you could just get the other person to see your point of view, everything would be better. You tried to explain, but to no avail. Maybe they didn’t get it, or maybe they just didn’t want to listen.
One of my big frustrations is that it’s really hard for me to explain my ideas to people. If you’ve read my articles for a while, you probably realize that I have a bunch of weird stuff going on in my head. This is the only place where I try to explain all that stuff — I know that if I say stuff like this in everyday conversation, people won’t really understand.
Getting an idea from your brain into somebody else’s brain is really hard. You might think that because humans have language, we can just explain things to each other, and there wouldn’t be any misunderstandings. You’d be wrong.
These misunderstandings can lead to war. A lot of World War I buffs believe that if all the sides involved had been able to just talk to each other, they wouldn’t have gone to war.
Why is it so hard for people to understand each other? Many reasons. Here are some of them:
Reason #1: People understand the same stuff differently
If you read an original Sherlock Holmes novel — one of the original ones written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — you’ll see the words “gay”, “queer”, and “ejaculate”.
Those words don’t mean anything about sex. The word “gay” means happy, the word “queer” means strange, and the word “ejaculate” means to shout something.
If you grew up in London in the 1800’s, this would make sense to you, and none of those words would seem to have anything to do with sex. But modern readers get confused.
The point is, we all interpret everything we hear slightly differently based on our backgrounds. Maybe you mean one thing when you say a word — but the guy you’re talking to might hear something else.
Even if you grow up right next door to someone, you have different life experiences from them, so you’ll interpret the same words differently. If you played football growing up and they played basketball, and you say “the center”, you’ll picture a big beefy guy hiking them a ball and throwing blocks, and they’ll picture a 7-foot-tall guy jamming down dunks and protecting the rim.
Even if a word means the same thing logically to you, it might not mean the same thing emotionally. Maybe in your childhood home you ate MacDonald’s every Saturday night. Meanwhile, in your neighbor’s household, they were vegan and ate lots of kale and tofu. When you hear “MacDonald’s” you’ll get fuzzy warm images and flash back to happy family dinners. When they hear “MacDonald’s” they’ll want to vomit.
Sometimes it takes a split second to understand exactly what they mean. And when you’re talking with somebody face-to-face, you don’t have that split second.
Sometimes it’s impossible to see where the misunderstanding happened. For example, imagine you’re talking to someone. Unbeknownst to you, when they were 5 years old, they spilled brownie mix all over the living room floor, and then their dad spanked them with a wooden spoon. You mention that you stirred your brownie mix last week with a wooden spoon. Congratulations — you just brought up one of their old traumas. Now they’re going to be shy and fearful for the rest of the conversation. (Conversation can be like walking through a minefield sometimes.)
This problem gets even bigger when you talk to people from other cultural backgrounds. They have totally different ways of thinking than you do, so they might not be able to make sense of what’s going through your head. The words you say might sound like gibberish to them, even if your best friend would understand them perfectly.
And it gets even bigger when you talk to somebody who doesn’t speak the same native language as you. When you learn a second language, you might know the literal meaning of the words in your new language, but you probably won’t understand their cultural context and all the associations people have with them. As a result, it’s very easy to offend somebody by accident.
Reason #2: Thinking About What To Say Takes Time
When I write these articles, I have all the time in the world to figure out the best words to use to say what I want to say. And if I write something down that I don’t like, I can go back and change it.
But when I talk to somebody face to face, I can’t do that. I have less than a second to come up with the right words. If I say the wrong words, they won’t understand me.
I have to come up with the right words while I’m also thinking about stuff like my body language, getting the person I’m talking to to like me, getting the other people listening to the conversation to like me, and even whether the person I’m talking to might attack or rob me.
In other words, whenever you talk to somebody, there’s a whole bunch of emotional shit going on that distracts you from the ideas in the conversation you’re having.
The result is that when you talk to somebody face to face, it’s much harder to say anything super interesting. Even if you’re struck by some super profound insight on the spot, you might not be able to find the words to describe it. You’re mostly stuck to saying things you’ve already thought and said before.
Reason #3: Things get lost in translation
Imagine that you’re an interpreter in Tokyo. And you’re translating a conversation between a Chinese businessman and a Japanese businessman.
You’ve spent the last 5 years teaching yourself Chinese and Japanese, and you know enough to vaguely understand what they’re saying to each other, but you don’t understand any of the cultural nuances. You translate each message as best you can, but you’re pretty sure that part of the message isn’t getting there.
This is what every single human conversation is like — even when everyone’s speaking their native language.
Why? Because our brain has 2 hemispheres. We talk with our left hemisphere. But most of our understanding happens inside of our right hemisphere.
Our left hemisphere and our right hemisphere have totally different ways of seeing the world. They think in different patterns and they speak different languages. In many ways, they’re as different from one another as a woman from Shanghai and a man from Amarillo, Texas.
Our right hemisphere doesn’t talk. Only the left hemisphere can talk. So anytime you want to say something, your left hemisphere has to figure out exactly what the hell the right hemisphere wants to say. That’s really hard.
This is why there are so many things people understand but have trouble putting into words. If you’ve ever had a feeling or an idea that seemed so clear to you that you couldn’t describe, it was because the left hemisphere of your brain couldn’t understand the right hemisphere of your brain.
Interesting tangent: when people learn how to read and write, their corpus callosum — the cord connecting the 2 hemispheres of their brain — gets stronger. My theory is that writing means practicing taking ideas out of your right hemisphere from your left hemisphere so you can get them on paper.
This might be why so many professional writers are fucked up in the head — the 2 hemispheres aren’t really supposed to connect to each other that much. Evolution designed them to stay separate.
Reason #4: People don’t really listen to one another
Even when I’m actively trying to understand somebody, I usually can’t understand everything they’re saying.
But I’m not actively trying to understand everybody. If someone is droning on and on about their fantasy football team, or what they had for lunch that day, I’m probably not listening to them.
Thinking takes up a lot of the body’s energy, so people don’t do it more than they have to. People’s brains just kinda shut down when you talk about something they don’t care about. (That’s why you don’t remember any of the calculus or organic chemistry that you studied in school.)
Also, sometimes people willfully choose not to listen because they’re afraid of what you’re telling them. For example, if somebody has their identity wrapped up in being a “liberal”, then you’re not gonna be able to explain any conservative points of view to them. They don’t want to listen. (And vice versa.)
Reason #5: People are trying to look smart, not figure out the truth
People don’t really pay that much attention to the words you say. They pay attention to the emotional content of a conversation.
If you’re lecturing them or trying to explain something to them and they’re not getting it, they will feel like you’re talking down to them. They’ll feel condescended, making it even less likely that they’ll listen to you.
From a Darwinian perspective, it’s way more important to maximize your status than it is to understand the world around you. You don’t get laid by knowing stuff, you get laid by being the mack. So when given a choice between humbling themselves and learning something versus maintaining their delusion and preserving their status, most people will choose to preserve their status.
We evolved to not really care about what’s true that much when we’re speaking. We care a lot more about establishing dominance and not looking like an idiot.
For example, imagine you’re in a work conference and your boss says something you know is factually untrue. If you get up and correct your boss, he might get mad at you and punish you for it, because you made him look like an idiot. The truth be damned.
Most conversations are more like rap battles than philosophical debates. You’re not exchanging ideas, you’re competing for points in front of an audience.
A brief conclusion
People don’t realize just how much can go wrong when you talk to somebody. It’s very hard to understand them and their ideas, even if you listen carefully.
That doesn’t mean that talking to people is a waste of time! If you talk to people and genuinely listen to them, you can have fantastic conversations with them, even if you don’t fully understand what they’re saying.
And by understanding what can go wrong, you’re more prepared to figure it out when things do go wrong, and resolve misunderstandings faster!
Hey! Thanks for reading.
My name’s Theo and every other Monday I publish an article like this one about whatever was on my mind the week before. Usually related to psychology, how the world works, or long term trends in society.
If you liked this article, you’ll probably also like my article called “How Cooperation Works”:
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Happy trails!
Two incidents come to mind with your point about people understanding things differently. I once used the word "plastic" in its classic sense of being flexible. My listeners, having a different frame of reference than I, thought "plastic" means cheap or artificial. That's just the way words evolve, and I had missed the boat. Another incident is from the old movie The Yakuza. The main character understands a little Japanese, and is speaking to a Yakuza member. The Yakuza asks him if he knows what the word "bushido" means, and the main character correctly, but insufficiently, translates it as "path". "No," the Japanese character says, "It means burden."
Also, of course, I'm the jerk who sometimes insists on saying the truth at a meeting and embarrassing the boss. I remember one meeting where our big boss said, "We have to accomplish A, B, and C. Each of those is a full-time task."
Naturally I asked, "Which one has priority?"
"They all have priority," he responded.
"Then you're telling us at the lowest level to make the decision of which one gets done."
Pointing out that he was abdicating his own leadership position and putting it on us did not make me popular with him, but my fellow workers appreciated it and came to view me as a leader.