WANTED: Real Conversation

Most People Just Want an Audience

Lost Art of Conversation

Help! Contact everyone you know! We need to post these flyers! I’ve searched everywhere, looked high and low, and I can’t find ‘Real Conversation’. Here’s a description:

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I write this moments after finishing a wonderful phone conversation with a great friend. What made it so you may ask? Well, let’s see. He asked me questions about what’s going on in my life, multiple questions and follow up questions, because he was genuinely interested in the answers and wanted to learn more. He listened, and didn’t interrupt me with his own stories or to share his opinions. And I did the same. Along the way, we laughed, commiserated about the state of the world, sprinkled in a little bit about current events, and said good-bye. It was great, and wasn’t very difficult. So simple, and yet such a gift.

So why is it that meaningful conversations seem more and more uncommon?

At the risk of sounding cynical, please tune in to our culture and see if you agree with me. If not, please set me straight. But from my view, it seems that the type of conversation I described above has become increasingly rare because we live in a ‘me, me, me’ world, where unchecked time spent on smart phones, marinating in ‘echo chamber’ social media has resulted in too many people who claim to know the definitive details of current events in real time, the full scope of all fields of science, and the history of pretty much everything.

The result of all this is that the give and take of real conversation has been replaced by people talking at each other.

Ours is a very noisy culture, and growing louder at an exponential rate. It’s long on one-sided ‘conversations’ (read ‘lecturing’) and short on listening with the intent to understand, empathizing, and dare I say, admitting that there may be things we don’t know.

Whoa!! Am I being a bit negative here?! Maybe so. I’ve been wrong before. Please leave a comment below if you see things differently. I’d love to hear from you either way, and if you agree, even somewhat so, let’s resolve together to play whatever part we can to restore ‘Real Conversation’.