You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

by Kate Murphy

To listen well is to figure out what’s on someone’s mind and demonstrate that you care enough to want to know.

What makes us feel most lonely and isolated in life is less often the result of a devastating traumatic event than the accumulation of occasions when nothing happened but something profitably could have.

People will pick up on your inauthenticity. You don’t need to act like you are paying attention if you are, in fact, paying attention.

In How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie wrote, “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”

I was there to find out why people so often feel unheard and misunderstood by their partners. Coche’s answer was pretty simple: people in long-term relationships tend to lose their curiosity for each other. Not necessarily in an unkind way; they just become convinced they know each other better than they do. They don’t listen because they think they already know what the other person will say.

So it doesn’t matter how long you have known or how well you think you know people; if you stop listening, you will eventually lose your grasp of who they are and how to relate to them.

The French writer André Maurois wrote, “A happy marriage is a long conversation that always seems too short.”

Listening is a matter of you deciding you don’t need to worry what to say next,”

‘We don’t need someone we can relate to, we’d rather have someone we can look up to.’”

Salganik told me using social media data to learn about human behavior is like learning about human behavior by watching people in a casino. They are both highly engineered environments that tell you something about human behavior, but it’s not typical human behavior.

Listening is the opposite of algorithmic approaches. “Algorithms aspire to make guesses that will be as accurate as possible,” Salganik said. “They don’t aspire to understand.”

Indeed, shared humor is a primary indicator of feelings of connectedness.

There are likely inside jokes and familiar gags you have with your romantic partner or best friend that are side-splittingly funny to the two of you but leave others scratching their heads. And when you try to explain it, they are still baffled because they haven’t been listening in on the long-running conversation that has defined your relationship. They don’t have the same deep, mutual understanding.

Either way, English is one of the easiest languages to misunderstand even if you’re a native speaker.

Virginia Woolf said, “Words are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries.”

But it must be said that lying is often a cooperative act. There’s the liar and the person who hears what they want to hear.

Because we only really know ourselves, it’s a natural tendency to have a solipsistic view of the world. We incorrectly assume other people’s logic and motivations resemble our own. But, of course, they have different backstories and baggage.

Indeed, we engage the same parts of our brains when we talk to ourselves as we do when we talk to another person.

For example, someone who has a critical inner voice will hear someone else’s words very differently than someone whose inner voice tends to blame others.

A silence of just four seconds is enough for people to change or nuance their expressed opinion, taking the quiet to mean their views are out of line.

“As opposed to really listening, you tend to be always sharpening your knife, thinking how to prove your point; why you’re right,”

People tend to regret not listening more than listening and tend to regret things they said more than things they didn’t say.

The power of the listener is that you get to decide how much effort you want to put in and when you’ve had enough.

Anyone who has shared something personal and received a thoughtless or uncomprehending response knows how it makes your soul want to crawl back in its hiding place.

Our devices indulge our fear of intimacy by fooling us into thinking that we are socially connected even when we are achingly alone.