Let’s stop mirroring the one-way traffic of texts, voice-notes and social media stories, and communicate collaboratively, writes Emma Reed
Recently, I stepped off a train feeling drained and disgruntled. I’d spent a 30-minute journey with someone I knew, where I’d made sounds rather than words: ‘Mmmm,’ ‘Oof,’ ‘Euurgh.’ This was because I had barely had a chance to speak. I was caught in the vortex of someone else’s stream of consciousness. I felt that if I’d simply left the ‘conversation’ (in the loosest sense of the word) mid-flow, it wouldn’t have made any tangible difference. A smorgasbord of emotions flitted through me: tension, frustration, boredom and, bizarrely, a grudging admiration that someone could hold forth with such a blissful lack of awareness – a concept alien to me.
This incident was stacked on many others. Over the past year or so, I’ve been conducting my own very unscientific social experiment in the belief that we are losing the art of conversation. Whether it’s performative point-scoring, people talking over one another, or just blanking, it feels that no one is really listening to one another anymore and, with that, we are losing nuance and enrichment in our lives, and compounding feelings of isolation, even in the company of others. It’s no surprise that the World Health Organization has declared loneliness a ‘global public health concern’. It’s as though people are glitching. The monologue seems to have taken hold. And this isn’t helped by social media providing people with a platform to relay the minutiae of their skincare routine, or the contents of their cereal bowl, without interruption or being met with bored expressions.
I’ve found I can bump into people and what should be a conversation turns into a recitation of tasks and timetables, the subtext being they are too busy to chat. Once I’ve been talked through the AA Route Planner for an upcoming journey or been given a breakdown of the ‘to-do’ list, I feel guilty for being the sort of person who has time to stop for a check-in; people seem more at ease with talking over others with all the subtlety of an out-of-control snowplough. On several occasions, I’ve seen a friend interrupted mid-story and marvelled at their calm as they pause and then resume the thread while I fizz with outrage. The most blatant was when my husband was opposite me at a dinner recently, seated between two people who conducted a conversation over him, until he suggested they swap and sit together instead.
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