#5 On Conversations, Language and Feeling Understood

On Loneliness

You are sitting in a group of people and language eludes you. Music drowns the sterile words, and you’re thinking what does any of this mean; not, that you do not understand the literalness of it, but what does it mean essentially? You try to say something, but there is nothing to say— nothing meaningful, at least. You are back in your room, and the room becomes a metaphor for an enclosure, a comfortable loneliness. You try to rationalise it by understanding the culture of alienation, how we are enclosed in a panopticon and how your loneliness is a by-product of a systemic alienation of humankind from an essence of life. Yet, it doesn’t help. It doesn’t satiate loneliness. It just rationalises it. You’re always back to drowning yourself in sterile words, staring at a screen that condenses the world in visual aesthetics, in codified semantics and loud reverberations of your own biases. You go through your contact list, and think of the last time you talked to so many of your friends. You do not know where all this time passed by. The painful awareness of passing time, and the realisation of your own mortality, presents itself as a paralysing dread. You close the list because you do not know what you will talk to them about. You lack the language to express the essential. You have never felt understood. You are lonely, and you do not know how to accept that. You do not know what the acceptance does.

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“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”
- David Foster Wallace¹

Last week, when I wrote about my loneliness, I never intended to share it here. It was a personal exercise at catharsis. Yet, last night I thought that there is something universal in loneliness. Something that everyone can perceive and feel, that hits the essential. However, at the same time, I wondered what is this essential? Not everyone went to a party where they could not speak. Not everyone finds a metaphor in their rooms or rationalises their loneliness. Yet, when we hear someone talking about their experience, we say that we understand. What is this feeling of understanding? What is the feeling of being understood? And the one question that I have wondered since years—In a world where no one feels understood, why do we not put in the effort to understand each other more? This is an attempt to share my thoughts on all these questions.

I think anyone who has read some of what I write understands my relationship with language—this amusing, dead thing that permeates into all aspects of our life. When talking to a friend, she summarised my lack quite profoundly. She said, “We lack the language of the essential. We fail at specificity. How insanely tragic to see everything but notice nothing!”

Language is the conception of communication. We begin understanding with language, and understand each other in the lack of it.

The way I like to explain it is to imagine two people A and B, at the beginning of humankind, devoid of language. They stand there staring at each other, with their shared biology. A points at a rock, and makes a sound. B points at the same rock and makes the same sound. They repeat this four to five times, until we have the sound for rock. But then, B wonders if the sound points to just the particular rock that A was pointing at, or all the rocks, so B points to another rock and makes the same sound and waits for A’s reaffirmation. This moment here, is where we are all stuck at. Years from when the first language was born, we are waiting to reaffirm our understanding of our own language, to confirm if we share it with the other person or not. We have grown better over the years at identifying rocks, and we’ve raised our language to talk about abstract concepts like love, loneliness, anger, the essence of humankind, and all the esoteric stuff. Yet, much like the first language, we are waiting, pointing at our hearts making these sounds in the hope that my specific language is understood by the person in front of me, that we are not alone in our understanding, that we too can convey the essential. This is what my friend meant when she said; we lack the language of the essential. Language, in its attempt to encompass the universal often fails at specificity.

However, it isn’t all as bleak as I make it sound. In the moment where we wait for our reaffirmation, there exists grace too. When A fails to make the same sound, B makes the same sound again. B speaks slowly this time, points to the first rock, makes the sound, then to the second rock and again the same sound. A understands it this time. A understands that we are trying to form a language, that specificity can be raised to a universality. It is an invitation to share your language, to borrow words from each other, to say that your rock can mean the same as my rock. Language can be a lesson in empathy.

Lev Vygotsky, puts it beautifully in Thought and Language, when he says,

“In ordinary discourse, then, speakers do not merely design optimal utterances - first-party Schelling games they believe will succeed. They demand evidence of success, the mutual belief that the addressees have understood what they mean. That relieves them of a heavy burden. It doesn't force them to design the optimal utterance every time, because what they mean is always open to repair and adjustment. They can even start with nothing - "what's-his-name" - and establish what they mean entirely by collaboration.”

Conversations, permeated in language, become a game when we offer grace to each other and ourselves. We do not have to reach the essential in the first sentence. We can start with a flawed utterance, and then slowly make our way to the essential. It does not matter if we reach it; I do not know if we ever do, if a true understanding exists. Yet, the fact that we are a part of the evolution of language, that much like ourselves, everything we say is open to repair and adjustment, and that a huge part of understanding someone is to offer your language to them.

When we understand the dynamics of communication, entrenched in a linguistic framework, we return to the initial question—Why do most of us have the same problem of not feeling understood? If we could start from a rock, and reach love, why is it so difficult to talk to the people we love? Should it not be possible that eventually, after years of talking, we will understand each other better? I think the answer is yes and no.²

Starting with the yes, people who communicate a lot do understand each other better. Imagine communication as a process of sending information encoded in symbols over a network. The more efficient network would be one which conveys more information in fewer symbols, that is one, which doesn’t strain the network bandwidth a lot. The way to achieve this, with the limitation that both networks and the symbols are the same, is to have the sender and receiver have memory, which develops context over time that what kind of messages are usually received and what kinds of output are expected. People, who understand each other, talk in fewer words. You can test this out the next time you talk to your best friend and an acquaintance. The common utterance, that, I do not need to speak a lot and yet you understand, conveys that over time, we have developed context to condense more information in fewer symbols, and we do not exhaust each other’s mental bandwidth by having to explain a lot.

However, as most things, this explanation works on a static system, a system which doesn’t change over the years. Human beings on the other hand, are extremely dynamic and irrational. Now, when a communication network is trained over a certain set of information, over time, it starts predicting the output even before an utterance is made. We can call it the hyper efficiency of turning communication on itself. When the receiver gets so confident at understanding the sender, it often negates the sender itself. The receiver says, “I know you better than you know yourself.” This marks the alienation with people who you’ve known from a particular phase of your life, which you’re no longer in. It is not that they do not know you, but they are unable to reconcile a huge information imbalance, a cognitive dissonance with their preconceived identity of yours and what you really are. It is most often seen in the alienation of young adults with their parents, as the parents fail to separate the present reality of the young adult with the image that they built over the years of a little child who they had to rear and take care of. We love talking to strangers, because for once, we feel seen as we are. We can recreate our identity from the start, leave out the biases and prejudices, make amends to what we do not like and often feel understood, as in our own fluidity; there is truly no point from where we get to start to know someone. Every point is a beginning. At every point, we have to offer grace and be open to the possibility of the person in front of us being a stranger, no matter how much time we have spent with them. Language is a constant attempt at understanding, at creating a shared vocabulary and ensuring that meanings do not change over time.

Lev Vygotsky says,

“In order to convey one's experience or thought, it is imperative to refer them to some known class or group of phenomena. Such reference, however, already requires generalization. Therefore, communication presupposes generalization and development of word meaning; generalization, thus, becomes possible in the course of communication. The higher, specifically human forms of psychological communication are possible because man's reflection of reality is carried out in generalized concepts. In the sphere of emotions, where sensation and affect reign, neither understanding nor real communication is possible, but only affective contagion.”

Maybe that is what we are attempting to do, to transmit our abstract emotions as a contagion, and hoping it catches on, because we face the absurdity and the impossibility of language. In every utterance, we are trying to transmit something beyond the dead language, something essential that is hidden within the language. Our endless pursuit to keep adding words to our language should convey a beautiful truth, that deep down, we do want to understand each other. David Foster Wallace, writes about synonyms, when he says, “Emission. Orduration, micturition, transudation, emiction, feculence, catharsis—so many synonyms: why? What are we trying to say to ourselves in so many ways?”
I believe it is all an attempt at creation, in not feeling alone against this giant absurdity that seeps into everything. Language as a tool for rebellion against existence, says a simple thing. Borges conveys in a simple sentence, “You who read me, are you sure of understanding my language?”

I do not know you, dear reader. Yet we have shared so much of our language. If you have reached this point, I just want you to know that we have created something.
I am speaking to you. I hope you can hear me

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/05/the-world-still-spins-around-male-genius/559925/

2. Obviously, the whole problem of a higher psychological realm and emotions is too vast to cover in this single newsletter, and hence we are confining ourselves to language here, which is just one aspect of this major question.