Things We Don't Say

A sentence is only a very small part of a conversation. This is about everything surrounding it.

I have been thinking (again) recently about how strange human conversation actually is.

We like to imagine that when two people talk, one person has a thought, converts it into words, sends those words to another person, and the other person understands them.

But that isn't really what happens, as a sentence is only a very small part of a conversation.

Someone says, "I am interested in this." What exactly did they mean?

Maybe they genuinely are interested. Maybe they are interested, but slightly overwhelmed. Maybe they are sceptical and don't want to say it directly. Maybe they dislike the idea but don't want to offend you. Maybe they are actually offended already, and "interesting" is simply the safest word available. Maybe they are buying themselves time to think.

So we see it's funny how the words haven't changed, but the conversation has.

High and Low Context

This is where the idea of high context and low context communication comes in.

In a more low context style of communication, the expectation is that the speaker should put most of the relevant information into the words themselves.

"I don't like this idea." "I disagree with you." "I cannot come today." "I am interested, but I have some concerns." The sentence carries much of the payload.

In a high context style, a much larger portion of the message is usually carried outside the literal sentence, like the relationship between the people, their shared history, the setting, social expectations, pauses, facial expressions, tone, what was said five minutes ago, and sometimes even what deliberately wasn't said.

Research comparing Indian and German online communication, for example, found differences consistent with this distinction, including lower self disclosure and greater use of emoticons among Indian forum participants. But I think it is better to treat high and low context communication as tendencies rather than some rigid labels for entire populations.

Once you start noticing this, ordinary conversations become surprisingly complicated, like they have for me. You begin listening to the sentence and to everything surrounding the sentence.

The Voice Beneath the Words

Even when we use exactly the same words, our voice changes what they feel like.

Pitch, loudness, rhythm, pauses, speaking rate and timbre all contribute information beyond the literal linguistic content. This is generally studied under prosody and related vocal cues.

Think about saying: "That's fine." It can mean: that's genuinely fine. That's fine, but I'm disappointed. That's absolutely not fine. I'm annoyed and don't want to continue this conversation. I'm trying to convince myself that it's fine.

The words are identical. The information isn't.

What Machines Hear

And so people sometimes misunderstand speech as well. We can extract acoustic features such as fundamental frequency, intensity, duration, pauses and spectral characteristics from someone's voice, and machine learning can find statistical associations between these features and emotional or conversational states.

But actually there is no universal emotional dictionary where high pitch means nervous, low pitch means confident, slow speech means sad, and fast speech means excited. Human emotion simply isn't that simple.

The same acoustic pattern can mean completely different things depending on the person, culture, situation and relationship. Research on emotional prosody itself still describes the mapping between acoustic features and underlying emotional states as surprisingly difficult to pin down.

Which, honestly, makes conversation even more interesting, as we are constantly doing this decoding without realizing it.

A pause before an answer. A sudden change in speaking speed. Someone laughing slightly before saying something serious. A sentence that ends unusually flat. A person saying "yeah, sure" while their entire posture seems to be saying "please don't make me do this."

We don't consciously calculate these things. We simply absorb them.

Becoming Readable

And then we start becoming readable. I wonder whether human beings eventually learn to solve this communication problem by becoming recognizable.

Think about the archetypes we create around ourselves.

• The builder, the creator, the analyst, the strategist.
• The social person, the funny one, the serious one.
• The academic, the ambitious one, the relaxed one.
• The "I don't care about anything" person.
• The person who always helps, who always argues, who is always experimenting.

We slowly construct these identities, sometimes consciously and sometimes completely unconsciously.

And this might be useful at times to fit in. If I meet you for the first time and you behave in a consistently recognizable way, my brain gets a rough model of you. I will know roughly what to expect and you know roughly what to expect from me. So communication becomes easier.

Society itself is built partly on these shortcuts. We cannot reconstruct another human being from first principles every time we meet them. We have to make assumptions.

The Archetype Trap

But I feel these days this shortcut quickly becomes the actual person. Because of course, over-exposure to technology and reduced attention spans, we have come to live through shortcuts.

Suppose someone spends years thinking: "I am the analytical one." Eventually, instead of doing things analytically, it becomes something they are.

Now imagine that person entering a situation where they need to be emotionally vulnerable. Or playful. Or irrational. Or artistic. Or simply confused. They may resist it because it doesn't fit the character they have constructed for themselves.

The same thing happens everywhere. Someone decides they are "not a social person." Someone else decides they are "a leader." Another decides they are "just an introvert." Another becomes "the smart one." Another becomes "the funny friend." Another becomes "the ambitious person."

And after a while, everyone around them learns the same model. You become predictable, which is socially convenient, but perhaps there is a cost. Because once everyone has learned your archetype, stepping outside it becomes uncomfortable. Not just for you, but for everyone else.

And I think we have come to like people we can categorize. Humans have a natural tendency to create familiar models of other people as it makes the world easier to navigate. If I already know you as the quiet intellectual, I don't have to spend much effort figuring out how you might behave. If tomorrow you suddenly become loud, playful and reckless, I might actually feel slightly uncomfortable because you violated the model I had built of you.

People like to brush it off by saying this is how the society is. I think the society isn't actively preventing you from changing. It is simply remembering who you used to be.

You change. Everyone else continues interacting with the older version of you. Attaching a TED talk I watched a few months ago that explains this feeling: youtu.be/dtfaccGmCCs.

Eventually you either convince them that you have changed, or you quietly return to the familiar version they recognize.

And perhaps this is why some people seem almost trapped inside their own personalities. They have spent so long performing a particular version of themselves that even they can no longer tell where the performance ends.

Shared Context

Looking back at it again, perhaps intimacy is partly the gradual construction of a shared context. Over time, a look, a pause, or even a single word can carry an entire paragraph because the other person already knows the context behind it. There is less translation required. And maybe that is why some relationships feel exhausting while others simply let you exist freely.

But this also makes me wonder what happens when we stop evolving. We need some identity and continuity, but perhaps there is a difference between having an identity and becoming identified by one. An archetype can give us a starting point, but it probably shouldn't become a boundary. I would rather remain slightly difficult to categorize, not just because being different is inherently better, but because I don't yet know what parts of myself I haven't encountered. It's not to escape our archetypes, but to remember that they are only models, and to leave ourselves enough room to change, wander, and occasionally surprise even ourselves.

Perhaps we become tourists in our own lives when we start experiencing everything through the same version of ourselves. And maybe knowing yourself isn't about eventually finding the perfect definition of who you are, but becoming comfortable enough with yourself that you no longer need one. After all, the deepest conversations might be with people where the words are only the surface, and the rest is simply understood.

Good day.