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After a two-hour conversation with a funny, literate Irishman on What’sApp and an interview with a young artist who uses ancient myths to inform his work, I finished the day exhilarated. This is what I have always loved most about reporting: the great conversations it makes possible. You live too much in your own head, I reminded myself, and it’s an airless, dusty attic. You need to do more of this.
That evening, an email shot in from a friend who lives alone, keeps up with the news, and felt desperate, as the world fell apart around her, for a good long talk. Then a text from another friend, this one furious with herself and in need of reassurance. And the next morning, my email served up an archival interview with Adam Phillips, a psychoanalyst and an elegant writer, in The Paris Review.
Pick it up in the middle, you will get the gist:
“…. Now, shopping and eating and sex may not be what you’re wanting, but in order to find that out you have to have a conversation with somebody. You can’t sit in a room by yourself like Rodin’s Thinker.”
Interviewer: “Why not?”
“Because in your mind, you’re mad. But in conversation you have the chance of not being. Your mind by itself is full of unmediated anxieties and conflicts. In conversation things can be metabolized and digested through somebody else—I say something to you and you can give it back to me in different forms—whereas you’ll notice that your own mind is very often extremely repetitive. It is very difficult to surprise oneself in one’s own mind. The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd. We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.”
And yet we feel so eloquent, words of recrimination or theories of the world cascading again and again like an indoor, mechanized waterfall. Moving nowhere.
So often, for me, a friend’s perspective has been balm. Or one of those reinvigorating aftershaves you see on TV. Agree or disagree, support or poke and probe and prod, it does not matter. Whatever was rolling around in my head was, as Phillips says, metabolized by someone else, and it came back to me richer, with fresh ideas added and stale ones discarded. How do people manage without the surprise of another viewpoint?
“The brain is fundamentally communicative,” writes neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod. “The brain wants attention. It yearns for reciprocity, for the undulating back-and-forth of acknowledgement and connection.”
A thumbs-up will do in a pinch, as will a heart or smileyface, but why have we let ourselves be reduced to nursery school pictograms? Thirty years ago, when I wrote for the now sadly defunct Riverfront Times, we received letters to the editor that stretched across three columns. Today it is rare to see online comments longer than the short paragraph Twitter taught us to write. The exchanges are more likely to trade links or insults than to explore the topic together.
If you want only facts, I lecture young journalists, then fine, report by email. If you want a few stories and a hint of the emotion that glues them together, at least use the phone. And if you want to understand who your source is and what they are telling you and why, meet them in person. There is no substitute for the texture of those exchanges. Slight hesitations, gestures, drifts into reverie, bursts of enthusiasm or vehemence, a sudden sadness in the eyes—all of that colors the information, guides your questions, unlocks possibilities.
Even then, reporting remains mainly one-sided. But a ping-pong of ideas, eagerly exchanged, building on each other, the structure rising tall—those are the conversations that feed us. And they are dwindling.
Back in the 1990s, Americans stole the philosophical café from Paris and made it trendy. For a while, strangers showed up at cafés and spilled their hearts and minds, thought out loud, speculated together. The conversations reminded all of us what was possible, and the ideas people raised on those evenings stayed alive in me for weeks after.
Now all we talk about is talking to AI. I am as guilty as anyone; its possibilities and dangers fascinate me. I ask Perplexity all manner of silly practical questions, and I let Claude shortcut me to literary quotes on obscure subjects or comparisons of various scenarios. But the people who have turned to AI as a conversation partner? Some cannot find a human who will challenge them as capably. Others cannot trust a human to accept them as unconditionally. The AI is so supportive! It makes you feel so smart!
Yet it has no lived experience, no emotions, no dreams (we had better hope) of its own. It cannot laugh giddily with us; all it can do is fake appreciation and compliment what it has been trained to perceive as wit. Surely a flawed, cranky human would make a better conversational partner?
In a 2018 revisiting of a study called “Eavesdropping on Happiness,” researchers noted that people who spent more time interacting with others had higher levels of well being, and those who regularly engaged in meaningful and substantial conversations were more satisfied with their lives. Both the quantity and the quality of conversations mattered. Surprisingly, personality did not matter. Introverts needed social interaction as much as extroverts did, and both thrived on good conversations.
Yet “our society abounds in bad conversation,” Paula Marantz Cohen observes in Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation. Online, some make angry posts guaranteed to get reaction, while others are scared to post their opinions at all for fear of getting a reaction. In public, strangers can no longer be chatted with—they might be the enemy! And far fewer people seem willing (this is anecdotal, from my own pained experience) to be silly, or venture a wisecrack, or look for something to commiserate or celebrate together.
Even with friends, conversations fall into routines. Older people joke about “the organ recital” as though they coined the phrase, and they begin each get-together taking turns reporting on their health, then their grandkids, then their hobbies. Others vent first about politics to get it out of the way. But if you ask a quirky question or try to explore beliefs about life, the group will laugh nervously and slide back to the familiar topics as quickly as possible. Safe! yells the internal umpire.
The joy of conversation, though, is that nobody has to win. It is not a game, and it is not a debate with a timer and a gavel. No one will object that you are out of order.
Well, my husband might. His mind moves in straight lines; mine winds and retraces and skips. Often when I move to another point he takes it as disagreement. “I’m just talking,” I say. “What you said made me think of something else.” My digressions dizzy him. Over the years, though, he has learned to brace against the vertigo, and I have learned when to let him forge ahead in a straight line without breaking his momentum. Now we have great conversations—at least, when we are not exhausted or overbusy or mired in routine obligations or swept into our friends’ chitchat.
That last bit only sounds condescending because I am so bad at chitchat. One friend scolds me for not keeping her up to date, but I can never imagine that anyone else would care about daily stuff that, for me, is over once it is over, and was not so interesting in the first place. Yet others turn the same sorts of daily trials into standup comedy or Faulkneresque short stories. Maybe I am just too bored by my own life, the mundane part of it? Which is a shame, as that is the stuff and substance of a life. Drama comes, thank God, only rarely.
Chitchat counts. Anything symmetrical counts, as long as we are part of it. We listen to other people talk to each other on podcasts, we read Q&As, we wait eagerly for the audience questions after a talk. We are still hungry for conversation. But we forget to look in our own cupboard.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
