Listening

Lately I've been thinking a lot about what it means to listen. I think that for most of my life I've been too scared to listen to other people. I hear them, but I don't really try to silence my own thoughts and fully pay attention to what they're saying. I think this has made me very stupid in some ways and ended up making me very isolated from other people.

As I've become more aware of this, it occurred to me that more often than not people are more like me than they are different, and it makes me wonder why listening is so difficult. I don't know why, and maybe this sounds a little stupid, since everyone always tends to romanticize the past, but I think it's modern media. Almost as soon as I was born I've been immersed in it. Television, radio, the internet, advertising. It's all around us all the time. We don't really have a choice, so we become force-fed consumers of all kinds of ideas that have been polished to look meaningful, even though most of them lack much substance at all. They come at us so fast that we consume, but we rarely digest, and I think that's the real problem. We're so accustomed to being force fed this garbage that we respond the same way when another human being wants to connect with us. We sit there and go through the motions of listening, but we're not. We consume what's said to us and continue on with our day as if we've just heard another pointless radio advertisement.