Conversations

Recently, I have been serendipitously catching up with some friends. Which made me ponder about the nature of conversations and their role in human flourishing.

My recent conversations have left me in a calm and tranquil mood. Something in my biology seems to be rewarding the process of conversing with another human. It could be our need for social connection or social validation, but I believe it could be something deeper. Something to do with our psyche.

Looking back, after college, I seemed to have cut ties with the outside world.

It could be due to my inability to maintain a social media presence.

I would think about someone, but I wouldn’t reach out to them.

The act of texting them felt like a disturbance masquerading as care, which in fact couldn’t be far from the truth. Whenever my friends reach out, we end up talking for a while and it ends up making my day.

Surprisingly, group conversations don’t seem to be working for me. They don’t satiate my need for soul food, as the conversation devolves into safe topics.

When a bunch of guys meet, the safe topic is dating or work. It is essentially superficial fluff, which makes you want to rip your hair out, due to sheer boredom and repetitive nature.

Conversation should carry substance. It need not be objectively meaningful, but it must be subjectively meaningful.

Good conversations reveal as much about oneself as about the other person.

My own thinking, which is often clouded from myself, is revealed in glimpses during conversations. I would return home and ponder about my own unverbalized point of view, which was tucked away in the latent spaces of my mind.

One quote which I keep pondering about is from Kendrick Lamar:

I’m not in the music business, I been in the human business.

Fame, glory and power is as enticing to me as the next person, but at the end of the day, the need for human connection triumphs over every other ambition.

We are a funny species, we spend arduous hours searching for “Meaning” in an universe devoid of such “Meaning”.

The “Meaning” doesn’t exist, but there are local pockets of subjective meanings, often times more meaningful than the “Meaning” itself.

Conversation is one such human activity, which helps us in finding these local pockets of meaning.

Converse more with your fellow humans.

You may indeed find your soul satiated and your life a bit more bright.