Listening

This isn't precisely on the subject of loneliness but is related to the topic. I think there's a general lack of really listening to people, so much so that people don't expect others to be so generous as to listen to them or they end up sort of sharing things in a fractured, disorganized way, or both.

I also think both are related to how we use media - and how we use our attention.

But putting that aside, I mostly just want to pose the question: Who has ANY channel of communication with any person in their life, either face to face IRL or online even never having met them, that REALLY listens thoroughly? I actually don't count formal recovery meetings, I'm sorry but that's fine for an intro but having to force people to be limited to a few minutes is just nowhere near enough for how much people want and to share to actually have an understanding - both for the listener or the person sharing and processing their stuff.

Like that line from the song Drops of Jupiter "five hour phone conversations" - who the hell has that anymore? And you can't tell me texting with a bunch of people at random intervals, where they disappear for a while or even a mix of forum posts etc. is the same as a real-time voice conversation - it isn't. Unfortunately a lot of people will probably have no perspective on the significance of that difference and just ignore it out of hand but thats another subject which would take a bit of detail to get into.

 

Lets just put it in perspective: A 5 minute conversation could happen 12 times in an hour, if we're talking only 3 hours that's 36 conversations. But I think it's safe to say it's nowhere near as satisfying as one long one.

Sure you have to be interested enough but it's also not always about the other person not being interesting or interested enough. If we're the one listening you gotta give it a chance to go somewhere, if we're the one speaking maybe being open enough to share that much, and a lot of that time may be warming up to something.

It's free, people can be giving this to each other but instead we're probably paying for some contrived form of entertainment while continuing to suffer from associated conditions as simple as loneliness and all the rest.

 

I feel it's largely because it's become a social norm, but it's less than functional to say the least. It's not even like learning a difficult subject where you have to study, it should be a natural curiousity about people but it seems like collectively we've strayed so far from it.

After I wrote this post I was thinking it might be a cool thing to offer to meditate for a while before listening to someone, but that may feel contrived and I don't know how many people would take that offer. It's like we all want it to be so casual or something, which becomes conflated with convenience and an idea of natural that we don't recognize the predicament we're in with this kind of social norm - which I think at this point calls for some very deliberate actions to address.

If I could be part of an accountability group, I would hope this is one of the norms. Traditionally a lot of recovery groups have speaker meetings where someone with a certain amount of time under their belt speaks as something of an authority with a little more airtime, I say let people who have something to say speak. Given people may even have different issues in their life just learning about their struggles can be a part of it, and by the same token people with time in whatever addiction or combo of addictions may NOT have experience in the struggles of others simply because it's different. You can't expect people to share themselves, the person in 5 minutes or less - and though they can share again on another occasion it becomes a bunch of short disjointed pieces. The average attention span being what it is the group, which has no guarantee of being the same people as the last share may have largely forgotten what was shared before.

 

True. I was thinking more for the strangers online to make a more concerted effort. I know there's the official NoFap support groups and while that might be a nice option for people who have the money, I wonder if it is even enough. We're certainly a far cry from the natural interaction in a town square. Even when people are nice and cordial it often feels like a "sounds like a case of the Mondays" kind of talk from Office Space to me.

 

I agree, it's really difficult and perhaps even harder for people who don't have a frame of reference of times when it has been successfully done. In a way it's maybe the technology that detracts from the quality, after all we have very influential work written down through the ages - that was the simpler technology of writing. On a social level it doesn't have to be brilliant, it just has to be honest and real. It seems to come down to a matter of distraction.