Have you ever told someone a story, shared an experience, or tried to teach someone something that you had learned, only to be met the with the response of "What does it matter?" or "Who Cares?"
This is an all too common way of trying to shut down a conversation or avoid learning. We use it when we're hurt and we use it when we don't respect the person talking to us. Most of all, we use it when we hold no importance in what has just been said.
Why do have a desire to share with others? At what point is what we're sharing, important? The history of humanity is full of conversations about our individual experiences, passed on from one person to another. We learn from these stories for the purposes of expanding our own knowledge. Life is short and there is no way of living your life and the life of any one other person at the same time. Even if you were to live a full 80 years, the person next to you could live a full 80 years of different experiences. There could be an infinite amount of facts and understandings that you'll never know, from just living your life.
In order to gain the lessons of another person, we have to communicate with them. We read something they wrote, see something they drew, hear something they said, or watch something they recorded. You may want to gain a skill for performing an action. You could spend the time to develop this skill naturally through trial and error. It could take you hours or even years to get it right. You could go through a lot of time and failure. Sometimes, this is the only option as no one has done it yet. It may also be that you can't find anyone that has done the thing, before you. Chances are, however, that you could save yourself a lot of time by learning the skill or method from someone else.
People have been around for a long time. People have also spent a lot of their time developing, growing, learning, and failing. You don't have to start from zero when someone before you already did.
We use communication to transfer our success to the rest of humanity. This is something unique to us. We can experience the shock of touching an electric fence, tell the story to someone that has never even heard of an electric fence before, and they will know what will happen to them when they finally encounter that fence. They have no need to touch the fence in order to learn the same lesson that you did, all from noises that we make. Shared ideas.
If you had read my shorts "Living a Bit of a Better Life" then you'll know that communication creates a major issue. We have another interesting quality as human beings. We have the ability to choose. We can choose to love or we can choose to hate. Simply put, we can lie.
I don't have to talk too much about lies in this segment. There is still more to be said but not much that I think you don't already know. We have to learn to distinguish the truth from the lie. As we share and communicate with one another, we also create a collective of ideas. Sounds that our societies can agree upon. Through these agreed ideas, we also create methods for agreeing on the past.
Many people have written about agreeing on the past, better than I could ever even hope to. We use perspective and context. We gather eye witness accounts. We study the language and stories and compare them to reality and physical or geographical evidence. When it comes right down to it, we find importance in what we're learning about the past. We trust it.
When you're growing up, you hold importance in the language that you're learning from your parents or guardians. The only reason we're able to speak with the people around us later in life is because we trusted that we were learning shared ideas in the sounds our care takers were making. At some point, we find that we can choose to dismiss some of the things we've learned, rebel, and start to create our own sounds in order to separate ourselves from our elders and create stronger bonds with our peers. This creates lasting changes in our language that carry on to the next generation.
When our sounds change meanings, the ideas are no longer shared with the same understanding. We create rifts in communication with people that we were attempting to exclude. The old words can still retain their definitions but we have to take the time to break down the terminology before an idea is successfully shared. We have to find common ground and agree on what is important.
Because it is important, we must have importance.
We desire to share, to learn, to include others, and create a society based on shared ideas through communication with one another. If you don't hold any importance in what someone else has to say, why do you even talk at all? Even if you don't want to learn from someone else, that other person wants to share. They are trying to be part of and include you in the same society. They want to treat you like a human being and share their experiences with you. When you shut them down, you're separating yourself from them. You're putting up a wall between you and the rest of humanity.
Our growth as a species depends on the importance of importance.
We live in a time when it is easy to argue with someone instantly. Even if that person is on the other side of the planet. Arguments, debates, and discussions are all different things. While a discussion is a conversation about a mutual interest topic, it has no winners and is not about opinions or conflict. A debate is looking for a winner from two competing views of a topic. A debate will have two sides and each speaker will present their information and opinion with the hope that their presentation will prevail over the other speaker. An argument is the worst kind of communication. An argument, though it seeks a winner, has no winners. An argument is about not agreeing with facts, figures, data, or the words of any other human being on the planet.
One of the worst arguments I've heard in recent years is "deny. deny. deny"
You instantly fail to communicate when you argue that something is a lie, conspiracy, presupposition, or a hoax simply because you haven't experienced it in your own life or with your own eyes. It's easy to just deny something. It requires no though and no proof. You don't have to explain yourself and you don't have to follow up. You just say "No. That's not true" or "I don't believe that" or even "That's a lie and you're in on it"
When you use the argument of denial, you dismiss the experiences of other people. You argue that it is impossible to learn anything from someone who has done something that you haven't. Even though you don't realize it, when you say that something isn't true because it didn't come from you, you are saying that you don't even speak the same language as the person that you're arguing with.
If the only thing you can do is argue and deny, you hold no importance in importance.
If you are going to communicate with someone, you should keep in mind that anything you use as a counter to what they are trying to share, should also not be able to be applied to your counter. If they're lying, because you simply don't believe them, then they can just say that you are also lying. There is no way for you to prove that you are not lying without also explaining that your experiences are important but that would also mean that their experiences are just as important.
If we want others to have value in what we have to share then we too must have value in what others have to share. You don't have to believe everyone 100% of the time but you also don't have to take a single person's word for absolute fact. You can build rapport with someone and through careful examination and research, find them to be honest and trustworthy.
In time, there will be a noticeable trend of who to trust. There will be people that you find that you are more inclined to believe over others. Try to strip away the politics and biases to look at the facts. Find who is the most agreeable. Whom out there is consistent with reality and regularly speaks, not with confidence alone, but with ideas that are shared by others who seek the same knowledge?
Have some importance in what is important. Everything is important. Here we sit, together, a species unique, craving attention, desiring to be part of the world that others see and to include others in our own world. Be a part of it.
Thank you for your time.
James D. Gray
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