How to Talk to Anyone

Shout out to all the obsessive people out there.

Any good English or history teacher and any philosophy teacher is going to teach you some form of analysis. This is to say that they will teach you to have a dialogue with inanimate objects, be it a book, a movie, a letter, or a persona you construct to argue with.

This is great for a lot of reasons. You can write better essays, enjoy almost any literature or artwork, think tangentially, improve your creativity and write posts on a subject you find rather boring at first glance.

What I'm going to say next applies only to the practice of implementing in depth analysis, not to the ability to do so. Most people assume that if they can analyze something they should, and get into the habit of reading into everything.

This devastates actual human interaction simply because we cannot imagine what it is really like to be that person. We don't know their life story, family history, biases, or even what they often say or do in situations they get themselves in. We cannot analyze people we don't know, and when we try to, we only hurt ourselves when we interact with others.

Most things in life aren't meant to be overthought or broken down beyond the simplest level. Most situations can be taken at face value. Most people are not that interesting, particularly to us, and even people we want to find interesting, like a lover or a brilliant professor, disappoint more often than not. We aren't meant to work off the assumption that someone is like us or conversation would be even duller than it often is.

Point being this: thinking about people you don't really understand and trying to fill in their humanity based off your own inferences creates a person that doesn't exist. Overestimating the conversation you can have with a person leaves you looking like a fool. Read between every line of Shakespeare's Hamlet and it won't hurt you a bit, but read an inch into the life of a person you just met and you're halfway to inventing a new universe.

If you haven't given into even a bit of your curiosity about who another person is, you will be all the more free to find out who they are when you talk to them, and nearly impossible to disappoint.