I was sitting at our local Starbucks today, enjoying a scorching hot chocolate with a few shots of chai (try that shit out, it’s fucking awesome) with my lovely associate, Rin, when an older gentlemen with a buzz cut and some nice shades came up and sat down at the table next to us. He was muttering half to himself and half to Rin and I about the heat and his boss. His extroverted nature was refreshing in this age of isolationism, so I asked him about what his job was. Over the course of the conversation that followed I was bombarded with all sorts of information that I couldn’t really tell you what all was said. Throughout the entire exchange, I tried my best to keep up with the industry tips and life advice he was offering me, but it just didn’t seem to stick. I couldn’t help but feel like what he was saying was going to be important someday.
Have you ever read a story, or played a videogame, or watched a movie where the main character is given advice or some cryptic bit of information early on that doesn’t seem to be of any relevance, and by the end it becomes clear that the answer to whatever is going on was laid out in front of them at that time? That’s sort of how I felt. Like this great important piece of data was being presented to me that would solve some problem I hadn’t yet encountered, if only I were to understand and remember it. The problem is that without any context that information is useless to me.
That issue, the lack of context, I think is the biggest road block in communication between generations, or even between different circles of people. That lack of common ground is a huge issue when trying to convey thoughts or ideas between people. It’s just not possible to effectively communicate your ideas when you have no similar frame of reference. Even now, I’m losing some of you because you have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s upsetting really. We’ve got all this amazing technology for communication across the fucking planet, and we can’t really express anything of value because we don’t all share enough common ground to effectively describe what we’re trying to get across. It’s like trying to point out star in the night sky when you’re in two different buildings across town. You both have access to the same sky, with a similar enough view that you know the star you’re indicating is visible, but your view point is so far removed from one another that your hopes of correctly identifying the star without special equipment are next to none.
That’s perhaps the biggest barrier with communication. We can translate languages and send data across our planet and beyond, but we can’t get that most basic level of understanding across because we’re using an imperfect system of communication. Most languages can only hope to be a sort of lens through which our perceptions of the world are translated, but it’s not a perfect translation. Then, when we synthesize ideas that aren’t present in the physical world, we have to relate them to things that we can describe. Try explaining to someone who has no sense of smell what it’s like to smell something. Try explaining what color is to a blind person. You need a common point of reference to be able to get that idea across, and when there is no comparable equivalent you know the other person knows of, you have no hope of getting them to understand.
Typing this article up is frustrating to me. I know that I can’t truly get my point across as I want to, because I have no assurance that you have the same knowledge or experience as me and so I have to assume things that we have in common and use those as a basis for my comparison. It’s very annoying, because I can’t get out exactly what I am feeling and thinking. Horrible! I rely on metaphors and similes to come close to what I’m feeling and thinking, but they are perhaps less efficient. Maybe not, maybe they're actually closer to what we need. Especially when it comes to ephemeral concepts, metaphors are perhaps the best tool to use for description.
I want you to try something for me. Pick an experience that you alone have had, one that you don’t share with someone you can talk to, and try and get them to fully understand what it was like without using any metaphors, similes or comparisons. Just explain what it was like in your words without trying to relate it to anything else. Tell me how that works out, down there in the comments section. This will be a little experiment, and I’ll compile the results for further discussion in later weeks.
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