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When you're leading a team of five or 10 people, feedback is pretty easy. It's not even really "feedback”: you’re just talking. You may have hired everyone yourself. You might sit near them (or at least sit near them virtually). Maybe you have lunch with them regularly. You know their kids' names, their coffee preferences, and what they're reading. So when someone has a concern about the direction you're taking things, they just... tell you.
You trust them. They trust you. It's just friends talking. You know where they're coming from.
At twenty people, things begin to shift a little. You’re probably starting to build up a second layer of leadership and there are multiple teams under you, but you're still fairly close to everyone. The relationships are there, they just may be a bit weaker than before. When someone has a pointed question about your strategy, you probably mostly know their story, their perspective, and what motivates them. The context is fuzzy, but it’s still there.
Then you hit 100#
Somewhere around 100 people, the ground shifts underneath you, as you realize you don’t know everyone anymore. You just can't. There aren't enough hours in the day, and honestly, there aren't enough slots in your brain.
Suddenly you have people whose names you don’t recognize offering very sharp commentary about your “leadership.” They’re talking about you but they don’t know you. There’s no shared history, no accumulated trust, no sense of “we’ve been in the trenches together.” Your brain has no context for processing all these voices.
Who are these people? Why are they yelling at me? Are they generally reasonable, or do they complain about everything? Do they understand the constraints we're under? Do they have the full picture?
Without an existing relationship, it feels like an attack, and your natural human response is to dismiss or deflect the attack. Or worse, to get defensive. Attacks trigger our most primal instincts: fight or flight.
This is the point where a lot of leaders start to struggle. They still want to be open to feedback—they really do—but they're also drowning. They start trusting their intuition about what they should pay attention to and what they should ignore. Sometimes that intuition is right. Sometimes it's just... self-selected, stripped of context, pattern matching against existing biases and relationships.
On top of that, each extra layer of management, each extra level to the top has separated you, and now you’re just not like them anymore. Their struggles are not your struggles anymore.
At 200, it's a deluge#
By the time you reach 200 people or more, feedback isn't an actionable signal anymore. At that size, feedback stops being signal being noise. A big, echoing amphitheater of opinions, each louder than the last, each written in the tone of someone who is absolutely certain they understand the whole system (they don’t), the whole context (they don’t), and your motives (they definitely don’t).
And all those kudos you used to hear? Those dry up. When you had a close relationship with everyone, kudos came naturally. You were just talking. But now folks just expect you to lead, and if they’re happy with your leadership they’re probably mostly quiet about it. They're doing their jobs, trusting you, assuming things are generally fine.
The people who are unhappy? They're loud. And there are a lot of them.
From where you sit, it feels like everybody's mad about everything all the time. And maybe they are! Or maybe it's just selection bias combined with the natural amplification that happens when people with similar grievances find each other. You don't know if this is a real crisis or just three loud people who found each other in a Slack channel. You just can’t tell anymore.
Because feedback doesn’t scale. Humans scale poorly. Your nervous system definitely doesn’t scale.
Why this happens#
Feedback doesn't scale because relationships don’t scale. With five people, you have some personal interaction with everyone on the team. At twenty, you interact with some, but not all. At 100 you still have personal relationships with 10 or 15 people, so there are a lot of gaps. At 200, your personal relationships are a tiny slice of the overall pie.
Making matters worse, as the din gets louder and louder, channels for processing all that feedback get smaller and smaller. Where you once had an open-door policy, now you have “office hours.” Sometimes. When we’re not too busy.
Where once All-Hands meetings had open questions, now you’re forced to take the questions ahead of time. Or not at all.
Even your Slack usage dwindles, because half the time you say anything, someone’s upset with it.
We tell ourselves we're "staying close to the ground" and "maintaining our culture,” But we're not. We can't. Because the fundamental math doesn't work. The sheer volume of feedback we’re getting absolutely overwhelms our ability to process it.
So what do you do about it?#
First, you have to admit the problem exists. Stop pretending you can maintain personal relationships with 200 people. You can't. Nobody can. Once you accept this, you can start building systems and processes that work with this reality instead of bumping against it. You have to filter, sort, and collate the feedback coming in, and you need to do it at a scale larger than your own capacity.
When you can’t rely on “just talk to people,” you need systems that distinguish between:
- legitimate issues
- noise
- venting
- misunderstandings
- and “this person is projecting a whole other problem onto leadership”
That means: structured listening, actual intake processes, and ways to synthesize themes instead of reacting to every single spike.
Build proxy relationships. You can't know 200 people, but you can know 10 people who each know 10 people. You should already have strong, trusting relationships with your leadership team, and then set the expectation that they have strong relationships with their own teams, and explicitly ask what’s on people’s minds. When feedback comes up through this chain, it comes with context. Pay attention.
At small scale, trust is direct: I know you. You know me. At larger scale, trust must be delegated: I trust the leaders who are closer to the work than I am. If you don’t intentionally empower those leaders to absorb and contextualize feedback, you’ll drown. They’re the ones who can say: "I know who said that, why they said it, and here’s what’s actually going on."
Build structured channels for feedback. For example, you can set up working groups to dive into thorny problems. The people closest to the problem understand it better than you do, and they can turn a flood of complaints into something you can actually act on. Or consider starting an "employee steering committee" for the sole purpose of collecting feedback and turning it into proposals. You’re essentially deputizing people who care deeply to listen for you, and then manage the feedback din.
Remember that every angry message is still a person. When someone you know well gives you feedback, you might not like it, but you’re likely to say "Oof. Okay. Let’s talk." At scale, you need to find ways to respond with humanity — even when the feedback you received lacks it.
Close the feedback loop. Let people know when you’re acting on their feedback, and if you’re not going to act on it, let them know that you at least heard it. Nobody wants to feel unheard.
In fact, you'll probably think — if you haven't done it already — that you should have an anonymous comment system to capture feedback. Don't. It's a trap. Anonymous feedback is the most contextless feedback you'll get, which makes it the least actionable. And it inevitably turns out to be contradictory or lacking key information, all those folks feel even more unheard and unhappy than before.
Finally, accept that you're going to get it wrong sometimes, and own that. You're going to ignore feedback that turns out to be important. You're going to overreact to feedback that turns out to be noise. When you make a misstep, be transparent about how you're correcting it.
The uncomfortable truth#
Past a certain size, you have to make peace with the fact that a lot of people in your org are going to be frustrated with you, and you're going to have no idea why, and you may not going to be able to fix it.
Not because you're a bad leader. Not because you don't care. But because feedback doesn't scale, relationships don't scale, and the alternative—trying to maintain authentic personal connections with hundreds of people—is a recipe for burnout and failure.
This is genuinely hard to accept, especially if you came up through the early days when you did know everyone. That version of leadership was real, and it worked, and it probably felt really good. But it doesn't work anymore, and pretending it does just makes things worse.
Note: The photo is of a large crowd gathering for a union meeting during the 1933 New York Dressmakers Strike. That's scaling feedback.
I considered it a possibility. Now it's set in stone. Instead of fully shutting down in the coming year due to tumbling revenue, leadership decided "What if we use someone else's platform?" It just so happens, the platform they chose is vibe coded.
Like many tech companies during the pandemic, we over-hired and had to contract over and over again. Without the VC-funded war chest that our competitors had, we couldn't compete in marketing and sales. Our brand-awareness shrunk into obscurity.
So, in all fairness, we lost the capitalism game. And, I'm fine with that.
| If you're curious, I'm sorry to disappoint. I haven't name-dropped, nor will I now or in the future. |
We had a plan to gracefully wind down, unlike Redbox (archived). Once the balance hit a certain threshold, a plan (prepared a year in advance) would have made everyone whole and return the remaining funds to the investors.
Except, the investors changed their mind and would rather take a chance on a future sale than admit defeat.
What's changed their mind?
| The allure and promise of AI workforce reduction. |
The technology costs are but a single digit percentage of the monthly spend – the majority is tied to headcount and benefits. When I saw the numbers going towards headcount costs, I fully understood the situation we were in.
The previous reduction truly cut headcount to the bare minimum that can still keep the technology we have operating. Any fewer, and there's a high risk of business interruption within a few months.
At the same time, the current revenue projection calls for the end of the business within a few more months.
We used to have a thousand people. Today, I can count everyone on my hands. A cut beyond this will fundamentally need a different operating model.
Given that our revenue can no longer support the staff needed to run our own technology, how do the finances work on someone else's platform?
Assuming that this Software as a Service (SaaS) can deliver what leadership believes, the napkin math suggests it'll work out.
With this SaaS, they expect...
- No engineering headcount
- No implementation headcount
- No support headcount
- Contracted sales teams to pick up the rest
So if they're going to lay everyone off and migrate to a SaaS, who's going to do the migration?
I'll be on my own for an extra month or two to migrate it all over.
Somehow, I need to keep the tech coasting in its last days while migrating all the data that I can.
| Thankfully, AWS is not a source of stress for me. Stuff still works, even if it complains years later. |
| I hear it's rough at Amazon and AWS. A culture where your job is to bandaid things until the next person takes over can't be good for your sanity. Or perpetually fearing you'll be next when Amazon lays off another 30,000 (archived) despite 21.2 billion in net profits (archived). |
I've expected either a winding down or a transition for over a year now. I've come to terms with an ending like this already.
While my peers are bitter about having a closer end date than me, I'm not as emotionally invested into when or how it ends.
What I didn't expect is how a vibe coded app passed as legitimate to the board of directors. We don't even have a contract with this platform yet and people are told they're being laid off.
Legal Concerns
In my two hours of testing and feedback, I found that — without immediate changes to the SaaS — we'd be immediately in violation of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), CAN-SPAM Act, Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
| I keep saying 'we'. It won't be soon. |
How could a platform be that bad? This SaaS has no customers in the United States. Their team is based in another country without similar laws or regulations.
Even so, I'm confident that vibe coded platforms made by people in the United States also unknowingly violate state and federal laws around privacy, communications, and accessibility.
One of our tech acquisitions was through a bankruptcy fire sale after the original company could not make penalty payments for violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. These issues cannot be ignored to do business in the United States.
Things don't work
I've used LLM assisted auto complete. I've generated inline functionality. I've generated classes and modules. And I've generated entire web apps. I've seen what GPT, Claude, Z.ai GLM, Grok Code, and Gemeni do across the entire spectrum of software development.
| Everyone has a different definition of "vibe coding", and as Theo described the spectrum of its definitions (at 4:30), I'll be using the slice of the spectrum "Ignoring the code entirely and only prompting" as my definition of vibe coding. |
Within a minute, I could tell it was made with Claude or GLM. Every picture zooms in on hover for no reason. There are cards everywhere. Links go to # in the footer. Modals have an closing X button that doesn't work. The search button up top doesn't do anything...
It's like someone took some screenshots of a competitor, asked an LLM agent to create design documents around all of them, and then implement those design documents without any human review.
| Which, is exactly the kind of workflow Google recommends in their most recent Gemeni 3 and Nano Banana Pro release. |
At the shallowest depth, I can see how a CEO got bamboozled. The happiest path is implemented. The second happiest path is rough. The third happiest path is unhinged.
No hacks. No reading the source code. Just innocent clicking around allowed me to break a critical invariant to running a business: I could place orders without giving my contact details or payment.
Besides displacing jobs, issues like this concern me deeply.
LLM-generated code can enable a business process quicker and cheaper than hiring a full team with benefits. With the experts that still value their craft steering the development, software can be produced just as well as without these tools. Business processes meaningfully affect people's lives, whether staff, customer, vendor, or share-holder.
At its extreme with vibe coding, LLM-generated code will have such poor quality that it is negligent to use LLM-generated code without expert oversight and verification. More lives are going to be affected by negligent software than ever before.
It is so much easier to accept that my life is changing because my employer couldn't stay fit in the economy than to accept it being displaced because of broken software made by a machine. The fiscal performance of my employer in this economy is the root cause, of course. And I accept that. Having to pivot everything to some broken SaaS that breaks the law? That's harder to accept.
| While it is hard to accept, I'll still do my part and will move on after a job well done. How well the new platform operates after the domain swap is not my problem. |
A glut of self-help books promises to teach us to do it better.
NOVEMBER 25, 2025
In my mid-teens I succumbed to a protracted period of intense self-consciousness. For about five years, give or take, I was convinced I had lost the capacity to chat naturally with anyone, crippled even in the lowest stakes conversations by a sense of terrible guilt that the other person had ended up in conversation with me — someone with absolutely nothing to say. I can hardly remember how it felt now, except that at the time I used to describe the sensation by way of several lines from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. They were about a character who came across a puddle she could not cross. In finding herself incapable of crossing even a puddle, her whole identity failed her. We are nothing, she cries out. Then falls.
I can see now that what I was experiencing was an acute form of something we all go through in the transition from youth to adulthood. A child is not self-aware enough to consider what their speech does or could do to someone else. At some point, however, they will experience the sharp existential recognition that if they are a subject able to perceive the person opposite them, that person is perceiving them right back. The puddle widens; it becomes for some of us uncrossable. For me, the realization that I could be judged by others, that I had no control over their judgements, nor knowledge of what those judgments might be, was enough to briefly render me speechless.
We dream of some alternative way it all might have gone: If we’d just found the right words to articulate our position, they might have come to understand or accept it; if we’d only kept to certain topics and avoided others…
Right now, there is a general belief that people of all ages are losing the ability to speak easily to one another. Increasing political polarization, the ubiquity of screens, the COVID-19 pandemic — all have contributed to a malaise and neuroticism around the practice of conversation. In the U.K., the phenomenon of young people failing to return to school since the pandemic has become so widespread that they are collectively labeled “ghost children.” A teacher friend told me that some of these children have confessed to her that their biggest fear is anticipating negative conversations they could have with their peers. After so long engaging almost exclusively with other children over social media — platforms that can intensify and melodramatize even the most quotidian encounters — they have forgotten what face-to-face interactions are like. The truth is, my teacher friend told me, the majority of conversations kids have with one another throughout the school day are neutral or often quite nice.
As lockdowns lifted, there were numerous reports of people feeling anxious about their atrophied social skills. Even before the pandemic, psychologists had found that more of us are choosing to break ties with loved ones. A 2019 psychology study suggested that more than a quarter of Americans are currently estranged from a relative — and that the majority of those interviewed in the study found the experience “emotionally distressing.” Even if estrangement is a choice necessary to our health or safety, we remain haunted by the absence of the people we leave. We dream of some alternative way it all might have gone: If we’d just found the right words to articulate our position, they might have come to understand or accept it; if we’d only kept to certain topics and avoided others.
In response to these worries about conversation and connection, a glut of self-help-adjacent books has appeared, promising to teach us to do it better: Alison Wood Brooks’s TALK: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, David Robson’s The Laws of Connection: The Scientific Secrets of Building a Strong Social Network and Jefferson Fisher’s The Next Conversation: Argue Less, Talk More, among many other titles. For several weeks, I lugged these books around between the library and various social occasions. I am long out of my adolescent period of social anxiety. And yet while reading them, I became acutely aware once more of how I engage in conversation.
On my date, I was distracted by a paranoiac daydream about our tentative, preliminary chat being dissected somewhere by a bunch of scientists in — as my imagination had it — lab coats. Was I “self-disclosing” intimate facts about myself to build up a “rapid rapport,” because I’d just read that people actually want to know more about us than we give them credit for?
Is all this totally artificial, I wondered midway through a first date in a pub. Wood Brooks, Robson and Fisher all offer neat digestible summaries at the end of their chapters to consolidate their strategies for how the reader might best conduct efficacious, generative conversations. “Self-disclosure is more effective than small-talk at building a rapid rapport,” Robson explains, “and people are more interested in your deepest thoughts than your instincts lead you to believe.” In the pursuit of perfecting our capacity to converse, Wood Brooks, a professor at Harvard Business School, routinely pores over the transcripts of recorded speed dates with her colleagues, along with myriad other species of conversation. She advises that “asking even insincere questions is a form of caring” and that those who prepare possible conversational topics in advance increase the fluidity of their exchanges.
Back on my date, I was distracted by a paranoiac daydream about our tentative, preliminary chat being dissected somewhere by a bunch of scientists in — as my imagination had it — lab coats. Was I “self-disclosing” intimate facts about myself to build up a “rapid rapport,” because I’d just read that people actually want to know more about us than we give them credit for? Or was I doing it because of the strange and fragile dynamic produced on first dates where — because there is no history between you and possibly there will be no future — you can exist more earnestly in the present, speaking more truthfully and unrestrainedly than you might even to your closest companions? Recently a friend suggested that in some ways a one-night stand echoes the dynamic of a confessional: this quasi-sacred space in which you can reveal deeper aspects of yourself, and from which you go away feeling somehow unburdened.
This is the difficulty with these books, and with many books that combine popular science with self-help: There are the theories, the summaries, the action points and then there is the unpredictability, spontaneity and mysteries of human interaction itself. As Wood Brooks suggests in her introduction, conversation is one of “the most complex and uncertain of all human tasks,” “an ongoing act of co-creation in pursuit of all manner of needs and desires, a stream of micro-decisions delicately coordinated between multiple human minds, as the context changes at every turn.” This is what makes it such a thrill, and potentially a total horror. Learn all the cheat codes, participate in all the pre-game warmups: It’s still impossible to predict where a conversation might take you.
✺
In The Art of Conversation (1993), British cultural historian Peter Burke notes that in classical Latin, conversatio meant something like “intimacy.” In vernacular languages up to the early modern period in Europe, cognates of conversatio often conveyed a sense of physical closeness: gathering or dwelling together. It was not until the late 16th century that the English “conversation” came to mean the exchange of words — and from there, to be written about as a kind of performance, a game through which you could achieve not just closeness to another person, but also influence and esteem. Wood Brooks, Robson and Fisher all respond to this last sense of conversation in some way — whether to take umbrage with the way it has come to predominate, degrading us all into becoming adverts for ourselves, to take it for granted or to encourage readers to grab some of that influence and esteem for themselves.
TALK is the expanded form of a course that Alison Wood Brooks has been delivering to MBA students and executives since 2019. She often speaks to the reader like we too are intent on using our conversational acumen to prosper in the corporate or political sphere. For example, when she encourages her readers to try a little humor in their conversations, she points out that people tend to “underestimate how often attempts at humor go well — leavening the mood, drawing people together, boosting perceptions of competence and status.” David Robson is a science writer who alights on conversation as an essential element in his synthesis of more than 300 academic papers into social strategies that will “help you build a more satisfying social network.” Like Wood Brooks, Robson has a tendency to consider human connection, primarily mediated through conversation, in pragmatic terms: “Once we have landed a job, our social connections can contribute to greater productivity and creativity.” Jefferson Fisher, a Texan personal injury lawyer from a long line of Texan personal injury lawyers, focuses in The Next Conversation on how to handle more adversarial conversations, with our loved ones, on the bus, in the workplace.
It was not until the late 16th century that the English “conversation” came to mean the exchange of words – and from there, to be written about as a kind of performance, a game through which you could achieve not just closeness to another person, but also influence and esteem.
I was most taken with The Next Conversation, the most no-frills, low-theory of the three books. I found Fisher’s approach totally uncynical. His mission statement is simple and, in its simplicity, quite radical: We should enter conversations not to prove but to learn something. Through conversations we are supposed to be changed and opened up to one another, for the puddle between us to shrink. In this respect, Fisher takes the reader closest to the earlier meaning of conversation set out by Burke: as a way of crossing the puddle and coming together.
The book has its origins in an online video short that Fisher recorded on his phone and uploaded to social media in 2022. The video, titled “How to argue like a lawyer pt.1,” catapulted its creator into celebrity status. In the video, Fisher offers three points for a better, more easily resolvable argument: Keep it short, keep the emotion out of it and don’t curse. It’s easy to see why that video, and his subsequent ones, became so popular: He has the sort of genial, unarrogant, unaffected demeanor that could charm anyone.
The Next Conversation is both a product of Fisher’s online celebrity and a response to it: From where he was standing, as a lawyer, as an Insta-celeb with more than 6 million followers, it seemed to him that something was going wrong with the way people were interacting — not just in arguments, but in all conversations. They enter conversations with their defenses up, and so fail to listen to the person opposite them. It’s as if Fisher’s occupation, which requires him to watch people battling one another with words all day long, caused in him the epiphany that there must be a better way to speak to one another.
The evidence Fisher uses to support his claims is largely drawn from his own experiences as a legal professional, as a friend, parent, partner. He is a born storyteller, the text enlivened by funny, idiosyncratic anecdotes, and his own interjections to those anecdotes, words like “blerf” and “oof.” My favorite of his stories is about a man named Bobby LaPray. LaPray witnessed a bar fight in which Fisher’s client had got caught up, so Fisher brought him in for a deposition to see if LaPray could be called as a witness at the trial. But the deposition was making LaPray visibly distressed. “His eyebrows began furrowing with each answer. A sign of negative emotion.” (Fisher is never afraid to state the obvious.) Eventually LaPray lets rip: Lawyers are the worst thing that has happened to America; all they do is lie. Rather than taking the bait, Fisher asks himself, “What else is at play? Who am I really talking to?” What’s been your biggest personal struggle this year, he asks LaPray. At this point, LaPray instantly softens, telling Fisher that he’s just had to admit his mother into an assisted living facility, there’s no one else to help him in supporting her, and he can’t understand a lot of the “legal stuff” required of him.
It seemed to him that something was going wrong with the way people were interacting — not just in arguments, but in all conversations. They enter conversations with their defenses up, and so fail to listen to the person opposite them.
Fisher uses this anecdote to underline another primary thesis: “The person you see isn’t the person you’re talking to.” According to him, this shouldn’t be a source of alarm: To discover who the person in front of you really is, you just have to ask the right questions.
During the enlightenment period, conversation manuals set out the “art of conversation” for upwardly mobile readers who hoped to consolidate or further improve their social standing. Today, there are whole fields of academia — in psychology and sociology departments, in business schools and institutions of public policy — that purport to anatomize the science of conversation, an endeavor that reminds me of an entomologist pinning a butterfly to a wall.
After four years of such research, Wood came up with “TALK” as a handy acronym for four maxims that she believes can help us master conversation. 1) Topics: a good conversationalist picks good subjects and can effectively use their chosen topics to optimize conversation. 2) Asking: “Asking more questions increases information exchange, but it also has a less obvious, and more important, benefit: It improves the relationship,” she writes, which is funny because it’s surely much more obvious or intuitive to ask questions because you want to know more. 3) Levity: It’s productive to insert moments of playfulness and fizz into our conversations to prevent them from becoming stale. 4) Kindness, “because great talkers care for others and show it.” She compares the act of conversation to jazz composition, “the art of negotiating change with style. The aim of every performance is to make something out of whatever happens — to make something together and be together.” Levity is thrown into the mix because she recognizes that, whatever the context, we enter conversations hoping to amuse and delight one another — even in a business meeting, there are always little sparks that remind you we are not yet all automata. The rest of the book is spent expanding on these maxims one by one, in her colloquial, easy style, with references to classic psychological studies, her own research and her own experiences.
Around 50 to 60 percent of U.S. citizens report feeling social disconnection at regular intervals in their lives. Received wisdom suggests this is a particular condition of our atomized, social-media-fractured present.
“Being a successful person is about relationships,” she writes. “And relationships are about talking. Good people, the types of leaders we are trying to train at [Harvard’s] business school (and everywhere else), are those who understand, connect with, learn from, and inspire other people.” There is a naivety here — perhaps the naivety necessary to keep believing that the people you are training in business school are the “good people” who are going to change our world. It also feels extraordinarily out of step with our moment: Enormously successful business leaders, and leaders of countries, are no longer required even to pretend to be good or kind or generous to win influence and supporters. And yet, despite Wood Brooks’s commitment to shepherding the business leaders of tomorrow, there are many moments in Talk where you can feel her straining against the limits of her goal to remake conversation into a pragmatic business skill. She recognizes that being too didactic about how conversations should go is at odds with “the messiness and irrationality of real talk” because “we’re all making it up as we go along.” In other words, conversation will always be, as Samuel Johnson once described it, “talk beyond that which is necessary to the purposes of actual business.”
Robson, in synthesizing decades of academic research, wants to elucidate not just how to conduct a meaningful conversation — the kind that moves beyond the bounds of small talk and allows us to feel more intimately connected with our interlocutor — but why such conversations are good for us. Building deep bonds with our fellow humans improves our physical as well as our psychological wellbeing, lowering our risk of Alzheimer’s and heart disease, he explains. The trouble is that most of us do not feel we are achieving sufficient social contact. Around 50 to 60 percent of U.S. citizens report feeling social disconnection at regular intervals in their lives. Received wisdom suggests this is a particular condition of our atomized, social-media-fractured present. We live further from our families, work from home, spend too many hours online and too little in the real world. And yet, even people who report seeing their friends, families and colleagues regularly describe feeling “underappreciated and unloved” a lot of the time, Robson points out. Our social and historical contexts may differ, as well as some of the technologies we use to communicate with one another, but there is something oddly comforting about the universality of our experience of isolation.
Naturally, our conversation skills grew a little rusty during the pandemic. And we do dilute our conversations by conducting them across many competing mediums at once. And maybe the differences between us do feel more insurmountable. But fundamentally, the gulf between one person and another — a gulf that can only be healed through our attempts at expressing, as best we can, what is going on inside each of us — has not altered. It’s part of the human condition, like the dawning of my awareness as a child that if I was a conscious subject with my own private world, so was everybody else.
Researchers tracked hundreds of students over one semester, asking them throughout that period to provide their relationship status, then answer the question “Who are you today?” Those students who reported falling in love during the semester began to use more adjectives and nouns than they had previously in order to describe themselves.
Robson offers copious evidence to suggest how pessimistic we are about our capacity to connect with others through conversation, in which we “consistently underestimate how much the other person enjoyed our company” (I was reminded of the U.K.’s ghost children, dreading conversations that would most likely turn out to be perfectly harmless.) “The average person leaves a conversation feeling that their new acquaintance liked them far less than they liked their new acquaintance — and vice versa,” he writes, describing a phenomenon researchers refer to as “the liking gap.” We are predisposed to feel shut off from one another; then, acting on our feelings of being shut off, we produce the very disconnection that we feared.
How do we overcome such barriers? After all Robson’s comprehensive laying out of the psychological research into human connection, the answers he comes to feel surprisingly obvious. We just need to make contact with one another — even though it is hard, even though we are likely to miss half the meaning of what the person opposite us is trying to articulate, even though we might often feel our interlocutor is similarly failing to understand us. Again and again, Robson’s “action points” are about reaching out to people going through hard times, trying to make new friends, rekindling old friendships. The liking gap, that great gulf we feel between ourselves and others, perhaps really is just a puddle we need to feel brave enough to jump over.
Probably, a reader could have worked that out without recourse to 300 academic papers. Still, my favorite of the psychological experiments Robson draws on is this: Researchers tracked hundreds of students over one semester, asking them throughout that period to provide their relationship status, then answer the question “Who are you today?” Those students who reported falling in love during the semester began to use more adjectives and nouns than they had previously in order to describe themselves. “Their self-concept literally expanded,” Robson writes, “as their partners helped them to discover new aspects of themselves.” He goes on to quote Anaïs Nin on friendship: “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” We are built relationally and dialogically; our selves grow through conversation with one another.
Every summer I teach a creative writing week for a group of teenagers at a house in rural Devon. One afternoon I was standing outside in the sunshine on the lawn with the other tutor, both of us drinking coffee. We were just talking, ultimately, and had been for a while, our coffees cooling. At one point, one of the kids on the course sprinted up to us to ask, “Why do you guys just stand around doing this all day?” It was a question my younger self might have asked. I don’t remember my response. But if I could answer my student now, I would say that sometimes I think conversation is about the most fulfilling, pleasurable, ethically minded activity you could possibly engage in: to sit opposite another person hearing things you have never heard before because only they could have articulated them, to be saying things you didn’t know you knew until the other person’s words unlocked them in you, not to prove but to learn. To let yourself be transformed by what the other person has to say.
✺ Published in The Dial
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