Casual Physics Enjoyer

Ever find having casual conversations difficult? I don’t think you should blame yourself. Rather than ‘introversion’ or ‘shyness’, I actually think this feeling comes from a systemic issue with conversation itself, that no one really talks about. Let me give a bit of background and explain.

In spoken conversations, I get moments where I try to find something to say, but can’t. My ideas suddenly lock up, like a sink clogged by cold oil.

When I am on my own - thinking or writing - my brain swims in a nice coral reef. There are colours, shapes, and ideas that I can latch onto. My mind’s eye sees a crisp scenery of thoughts.

But when I am talking to someone, that coral reef can sometimes turn into a wide, monochromatic ocean. At that point, I’m trying to look hard for features and things to say.

For me, this can happen with friends I have known for more than a decade. Or at family functions. Or with strangers. The effect doesn’t discriminate.

Much like people who fear open oceans, I get anxious when I blank out like this. Then like a recursive loop, I get stressed about being stressed, out of self frustration. Who doesn’t kick themselves about not being socially able? And then after that, I get stressed about being too hard on myself. And the cycle continues, till infinity.

Unfortunately, this sometimes ends in me politely saying that I need to wash my hands or something, thereby excusing myself from the conversation. Which is a shame.

I’ve ignored this truth about my shit conversation skills for years. I’m in my late-twenties now, and it hasn’t really gotten better. And self-help books don’t work because speaking to someone with guidelines doesn’t really get to the heart of the issue.

But now, I feel like writing essays has given me some clarity of thought on how conversations work.

You see, most people place conversation anxiety as a symptom of ‘shyness’.

But I think this is really wrong. Whilst I find conversations difficult, I’m actually not that shy as a person. I have quite a few friends. I regularly go to house parties and sometimes to clubs. So I don’t think it’s fair to build any correlation with how shy someone is with how well they can hold a conversation. The opposite way round is true as well. I also know plenty of introverts, people considered shy, that hold conversations exceptionally well.

So why do I get paralysed when I speak? Well, I think it’s actually just systemic feature of the spoken word. Conversation as a medium of idea exchange is just bad.

It’s bad because words are highly ambiguous tools to communicate. And so, short sentences found in casual conversation don’t allow for a crisp exchange of ideas between people. And so, people like me who find ambiguity hard, have a crap time having conversations. Let me convince you why this is the case.

In my short time writing essays, I’ve realised that words are much more ambiguous than I thought. This is because most people portray ideas with words that describe their state of mind, rather than illustrate real world states that the ideas are linked to. The issue with using words that describe your state of mind, is that only YOU know what you really mean.

Despite being a mathematician, I’ve really learnt this fact from the creative writing community.

I’ve been trying to improve how accurately I portray an idea to my readers. One of the main pieces of advice I hear on the writer’s reddit is ‘showing not telling’.

Instead of writing something or saying something like ‘he was mad’, it’s better to show it. That means describing real, mechanistic actions that the reader can visualise in the real world. For instance, ‘he smashed his fist against the wall’, or, ‘he walked off quickly’.

This reminds me a lot of what Murakami wrote in his memoir. A lot of writers’ time is thinking about ways where you can say ‘for instance’. And with each different way to show it, you are selecting a different shade of emotion. Smashing one’s fist against the wall communicates a quick, aggressive temper. Whereas walking off quickly can imply a more avoidant personality type.

And so in conversation, short sentences mean that the speaker is presenting an album of thousands of different images for the me to chose, and only one of those reflects the one that they really mean. It’s like trying to select the right card from a face down deck. The more ‘showing there is’ in a string of sentences, the more that deck of cards is eliminated, and the crisper the idea is.

But this is why conversations are hard. Conversations usually consist of two or more people saying a couple of sentences back and forth. So there isn’t space to ‘show and not tell’.

And I don’t want to piss off who I’m talking to by always interrupting with a ‘can you give me an example?’. Instead of saying ‘this is nice apple crumble’, I would rather hear something like ‘the texture is crunchier than most other apple crumble places around here!’. Honestly, I wish more people would think about this, because it would increase the dimensionality of questions I could follow up on.

And in the same vein, I think ‘knowing someone well is a measure of how you can ‘trade images’ with each other with less words.

So why are some people better at conversations that others? Well, with this model, I think that these people are just more comfortable in accepting the ambiguity of the spoken word. But being more comfortable with uncertainty is a really different question to not being shy. So, don’t be so hard on yourself.

Happy holidays, and good luck with the family functions!