The Lost Art of Conversation

Learning to talk in the age of status updates.

It’s an interesting revelation to me that wherever I go- I seem to know more about the people around me than the other way around. For example, I know more about each barista that serves me each and every day. I don’t know if this is an intentional thing. I may ask them how they are and when they reply, I listen. I turn towards a table and begin my work and then without attempting to, really, I retain that knowledge. Those blocks of information eventually stack up like a tower of Jenga to formulate a person. I’ll have a meeting with someone regularly within a couple years for work and realize only later that I once again only listened. I stacked high little bits of information- childhood, family, hobbies, goals, and the list goes on but it never quite seemed to volley back towards the other side of the net. I have to wonder… was it always this way or has something changed? I’ve always been able to strike up conversations. There were certain rules established- the secret kind of rules like in polite Japanese society. Both parties are meant to abide by the rules in order to not come off as rude or self absorbed but lately I do not understand the game. Perhaps in all of our years now with social media, we have lost the back and forth required to build something meaningful. We observe, not through stories, but through pictures. Maybe it’s no longer rude to not ask. We do not ask others to post, they just do, and we respond often times without words but just a tap to affirm a glimpse into their life. Then within a second of tapping, we are onto a new person, perhaps a person we met in some obscure setting several years ago. Maybe we don’t remember because we don’t need to. Who needs to read a map when GPS is built into a phone? Yet I miss conversations. The kind that stack gently on top of one another and build something for both sides. The kind that remembers. The kind that, at least on the surface, symbolizes a sort of care.