The Art of Communicating…
So it was about two years ago when I started getting many arbitrary questions from people about my personal interests. Most of these questions did not really fit into the conversation and seemed to be thrown in on a whim. It made me very curious about what the person was thinking right before they asked.
I tried to be reflective afterwards and evaluate whether something I was doing had dictated the shift in conversation. Maybe I was the cause of this behavior:
- Was I being too candid so they wanted to change the subject?
- Was I talking too little so they wanted to change to a more general topic?
- Was I talking too much about something they didn’t care about?
- Had I said something and this was this a test to find out more information about me?
I could not come up with anything that would be obvious. In general, we were just having a casual conversation. At the time I just shrugged off the moment as a random event but I noticed a trend starting to build over time. It didn’t really matter where the conversation took place - work, gym, coffee shop, restaurant, elevator, etc. It didn’t really matter what brought us together - neighbor, co-worker, date, random person, etc. If the person was under 40 years old then I typically had a similar reaction with maybe the occurances being more frequent with younger people. Each person was interested in my personal interests and this was fine until I tried answering their questions.
I have interests but I realized that I communicate those interests differently. I talk about my interests by describing it and what I gain from it. For example, I take bicycle rides frequently becasue I like the exercise, being outside, and exploring new places - I feel more invigorated afterwards. In contrast, the person I was talking to described the physical description - brand, special features, color - and how they came into ownership of it. As much as I appreciated the origin story of her bicycle, I really wondered if she actually likes riding and what motivates her to ride. My follow up question of why do you like riding resulted in a vague ‘it is something I just like’ type of answer. I realized that the people I was talking to were conveying very concrete and non-personal information.
Now, if I was the early teen version of myself with the social skills often confused with a person on the high functioning portion of the autism spectrum then I might really enjoy these conversations. We could take turns sharing facts. These facts would lead to first person recounts of a past experience. Maybe there would be a moment where they would have had a similar experience and it would be their time to share.
Unfortunately, I am not that person anymore so this encounter is not exactly fulfilling or even interesting to me anymore. Some stories like this are important and sometimes you need something like this to fill time but ultimately there should be a bit more to a conversation. What is interesting from this experience is how often I experience or overhear people having these rote conversations. When I try to create a deeper conversation then you would not believe the shock the person has. It’s like in the back of their mind is a voice saying ‘those are secrets that only I can know’ or maybe for the skeptic the voice says ‘that information tells them too much about me’.
Maybe these reactions are just due to the people being young. Many people in their 20s and 30s have always had technology like a cell phone and in recent years have been more isolated due to covid. I’m at the older end of that age spectrum and was a teenager or young adult during the beginning of the tech boom. I will definitely attest that my generation used technology in destructive ways. Just look at television, music, and apps that came out between 2000-2010 and you will notice a signficant amount of salacious content and promotion of stereotypes. It was difficult to get away from these influences and I think people mimicked this ‘environment’ in their own lives. Living through that time period meant that you learned to assess people’s intentions and really decide what you wanted out of the interaction. Thinking back on those times, I think younger generations might think we were fairly crazy but learned to be unfazed by people and seek out honest responses that matched our standards.
So to live in this dual culture, where older Millennials experienced the wild west of a social and technology paradigm shift and younger people experiencing only the after effects of the shift, the two groups will need to learn how to negotiate their differences of communication and risk taking. I know that I will need to change how I talk in personal settings because the person might not be as open with their true opinions and feelings and that I might be too abrupt. It will be interesting to see how the generations differ as time progresses.
