Why Are We Communicating So Much?
The Thought
Communication is defined as the process of information sharing. LOL… Right! 😜
How much of our communication is actually information! The innumerable Whatsapps about “Khana Khaya… 🍔?”, “Good Morning ☀️” or even “Happy Birthday 🍺” are definitely not. There are 34 billion whatsapp messages everyday with an average user spending around 195 minutes weekly on the app. Apart from our whatsapp, we spend endless hours communicating with office colleagues, friends, family on different channels like in person, phone, skype, texts, etc.
You know how much of it is information sharing? I don’t know but I am sure it’s not more than 10%. Then what the rest 90% of it is? Yuval Noah Harari says it’s GOSSIP. Gossip is talking about people other than ourselves. Our discussions about our bosses, colleagues, families, Donald Trump, Steve Jobs, Justin Beiber, Virat Kohli — everything qualifies as gossip.
But if we consider gossip as such a negative thing to do, still why do we do it so much. We are smart species, we should realize by now that this amount of communication is affecting our productivity and it’s costing us a fortune in data warehouses. Wouldn’t it be better if we only communicated for exchanging information?
The Feeling
Almost a year back I wrote about the Fear of Being Alone. I was feeling this constant need of communication — it didn’t matter how close the person was as long as we had some interesting conversation going. But those interesting engaging conversations were depressing me further because when those communications were not there I felt ALONE. I felt alone because I had someone and then they were not there. It eventually led me to believe that if I had someone to talk to I would be happy. But that’s NOT TRUE. Having someone to talk to would just make me NOT DEPRESSED.
Having someone in our life for companionship, to talk to, doesn’t make us happy. It just makes us NOT sad. And absence of sadness is not happiness. If having someone in our life, always have someone to talk to, would make us happy then everyone who is married would always be happy. But we all know that’s far from truth. There are so many married people who are sadder than they were before marriage (although they might not accept that openly). Happiness is not dependent on how many people we have to talk to.
Happiness is only possible when Reality > Expectation ❤️
The Revelation
We exchange so many messages on daily basis just to ensure ourselves that we have someone to talk to. We do not want to be in a position where we are ALONE; we want to be NOT depressed and NOT sad. How many times have we wished someone “Happy Birthday” thinking that if we do not, he/she will not wish us? We communicate just to ensure that the other person will communicate with us. We shouldn’t lack people to talk to. Belongingness, communication, affiliation are one of human’s innermost primary needs. In historic times it ensured our safety. We are just trying to build the safety net by communication.
The Imagination
Humans have always been evolving to become more efficient and more productive. Now that we have developed various other safety systems like the government, law, medical care and insurance, we have been reducing our social closeness. We have gradually moved from clan culture to joint family to nuclear family culture. Our survival is becoming less and less dependent on fellow human beings. Evolution, I believe, could eventually lead us to improve our communication process as well. We would reduce meaningless conversations and increase information sharing. There would be no meaningless yackity yacks, only sharing of data, information and feelings — like SIRI does today.
What would that world look like?
PS: Writing is like a therapy. You could encourage me to do more by giving this a 👏. If you find this bullshit 💩 please leave a feedback.
