Why is it so hard to communicate?
Whether you got scolded by your boss for executing a task the wrong way, argued with your partner because you keep misunderstanding them, or stayed up all night wondering why your parents just don’t get it, it is certain that you, dear reader, were once baffled by our inability to communicate. You may have wondered what makes it so hard to just understand the people around you, or why you need to pour your heart out on multiple sessions just so the person sitting in front of you understands something that appears so trivial to you. Well, rest assured for you are not alone. This exact problem can only exist as an issue while we all suffer from it, for it takes two to tango let alone to communicate.
On the bright side, its universal nature made it a matter of wide debate and investigation. An interesting thought is provided to us by an Austrian philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein. In his book “Tractatus logico-philosophicus”, he argues that the main challenge to proper communication is that we perceive words in the form of images. For example, if I say something as simple as “apple”, some would picture red ones, others would picture green ones, rotten ones, and some would go as far as to picture overpriced IT equipments and the list goes on. The explanation behind this is that we perceive things based on our own subjective experiences and we highly depend on the context we live in to formulate images for what we hear.
Clearly, not being able to convey the exact picture of an apple that you have in mind isn’t much of a problem in the sense that no relationships were ended, no wars were started ( that I know of), because two parties did not manage to reach an apple consensus. On the other hand, the moment we start talking about more controversial words or concepts such as “love”,“feelings”,”needs”, “justice”, etc., the room for misunderstanding certainly can and did generate conflict. Historically, millions were killed in the name of different pictures of “justice”, wars were launched because nations simply had different ideas of what “peace” should look like. An example with fewer casualties but equally dramatic is that you probably had to leave someone because you couldn’t paint the same picture of the word “relationship”.
Perhaps, this is exactly why humanity invented adjectives, lots and lots of them. Needless to say that most of the time the vocabulary we have in hand is not remotely enough to paint the perfect picture understood by all, or as our guy Ludwig Wittgenstein so dramatically puts it:
“The Limits of my language means the limits of my world”
In conclusion, we struggle to communicate because we do not share an exact similar background and we are limited by the language we have. In a world where the language is getting more standardized by the minute, I think the need to diversify is getting stronger in the sense that we need to develop a more intimate vocabulary between ourselves and the people we seek to communicate with so we can overcome the existing barriers. And finally, for the sake of anything that is holy, please say exactly what you have in mind as it’s already hard to make sense of that by itself.
