I am frequently guilty of not saying exactly what I want to convey. Except for Joon, and Elliot occasionally if his creative mind still does not suffice to complete my thought for me, no one really forces me to clarify my statements. Asking myself what exactly I am trying to say is a highly optional activity. It has actually improved a lot since high school, where I took to philosophical and theoretical readings too soon without realizing how a lot of them were badly written, or at least written with the presumption of preceding texts. I talk as if people are privy to the conversations I have in my own head.
Sometimes, even with an established narrative pretext, people still remark about how they do not get what I really mean, or at least immediately. This has rarely occurred in academic settings, mainly because I have not really been a participant in discussion-based seminars for over two years. This rather happens in very casual conversations, and only where we are relatively close or have accumulated a sizable reservoir of in-group knowledge or inside jokes. In English, this would typically take the place of me making a overgeneralized statement that can just mean anything. In Vietnamese, this would be in the form of me inserting a seemingly off-topic reference into an otherwise consistently themed dialogue.
I have begun to connect these two phenomena in a way that combines neurolinguistic and sociolinguistic reasons. Before going further, I want to refrain from diagnosing myself with any conditions, though what I have described so far is aligned with some form of hyperactivity. I also would like to platform myself as an enjoyable conversationalist who will take great pains to fill up awkward pauses and keep the ball rolling. That said, I think that, in the few seconds after being asked a loaded question, and as I listen to what the other people have to say, my mind gathers all the necessary phrases or stories that I want to hit in response. These are not just quips, though I would try to be funny whenever appropriate. They are also not monologues, as I try my best not to overexert myself in the focal composition of the conversation (even saying the term “focal composition” is already doing too much). What I think happens is that I mentally react to almost anything I hear by drawing parallels to what I know, and if there are multiple things that flood my mind, I will try to make one response that can cover all the bases. My best guess is that my conversations in English tend to be more turn-based, and my style of English usage tends toward condensing ideas into one broad complex sentence, whereas my conversations in Vietnamese tend to be more sporadic in the format, with Vietnamese containing idioms or words that you can easily decompose into constituent concepts, from which I reconstruct new metaphors.
I am not sure if other people experience something similar, especially multilinguals knowing starkly different languages. I have the privilege of being comfortable conversing in two languages with native proficiency, and my goal is to have neutral preference towards either language regardless of context. But that would not necessarily mean that I would think and speak similarly when I alternate between the languages–not to mention that I really like to mix them up. My worst recent discovery is that I confuse Vietnamese words by using English rhymes. I am not even sure how that came about.
Part of me boasting about my capacity to hold a conversation is that I think most people do not mind this particular quirk of mine. In fact, I use it to my advantage, and some people even enjoy the fact that our conversations can unfold in many directions. Maybe the people that I seem to like talking to the most also do not mind making their own interpretation of what we are saying when met with nonspecificity. It is like if you tolerate “bear with me” video essay TikToks with varying degrees of conspiratorial thinking, but for more mundane topics like how the demographic layout of Boston differs from that of Los Angeles. Directions can mean going big, going small, or going to a place that did not seem to rationally follow from before. If we want to have fun talking, the easiest way would be for us to willingly “bear with” each other, and usually for me that is a given.
I think being able to converse well is inarguably one of the worthiest skills to learn. It helps when you want to go out and meet people, professionally or romantically. Like any other skill, you want to be both strong in a specific element but also versatile. Good public speakers do not necessarily make enjoyable sports commentators behind a giant TV screen in a local pub on a Thursday night. Speaking charismatically does not carry weight for long if there is limited added value in what is actually being presented. But everyone talks about the substance; not enough people tell you to also care about the form, how so few of us actually have both.
My personal preference is to talk in small-group settings, with no more than six conversants, as opposed to in presentation-mode crowds. Maybe it is because I do better in that context; I choose to think it is because being good at one-on-one conversations takes more dynamism than large lectures. It is more of an art than a science. There are formulas that you can follow, but the flavor of relationship that two people cultivate throughout a conversation is better when it is complex, or even unique. For instance, prompting others to talk in earnest about something you think they care deeply about means that you do not want to totally dominate the conversation, but steering it step-by-step while ensuring that you are not somehow weaponzing their thoughts and tales against them. It does not mean that you have to agree, but oftentimes being right is not the end goal of a relationship. Sometimes it is about leaving space such that both parties can comfortably go back and forth.
Now this might have made me accidentally come across as someone who socially engineers my relationships. This is almost always not the case. I have found that being manipulative is likely never best proposition, and that “vibes” can be picked up in such various ways that I would not want my reputation to be that kind of negative. Rather, I think of myself as someone committed to ensuring people have a good time interacting with me. I choose to adapt to others in our conversations such that the proverbial volleying can happen. Sometimes I leave those conversations feeling satisfied with how everything went, because I could sense that other people had at least a decent time. Every now and then, I found people who enjoy my kind of humor and surprise me with how much they also set me up for a good laugh (or, alternatively, ask me a deep, clever question). That is how many of my friendships come to be.
My insistence on the art of organic conversational relationship-building does not always succeed as I intend. For a lot of scientists that I meet, conversations that are orthogonal to the science at stake are uninteresting, if not counterproductive. I am not talking about my advisor and our weekly updates, even though I would not mind that if I were the person in the supervisorial capacity. I am talking to other tech enthusiasts, especially those in software and AI, many of whom brainstorm around Artificial Intelligence as either a capitalistic vehicle for personal monetary gain or a complete revolutionizer that ushers in a post-humanity Earth. I also bemoan some recent trends in broader society as it faces existential social conundrums. I believe that college students have been increasingly more antagonistic towards education for learning’s sake, where they are disincentivized by the uncertainties of society and look to professions that pay the best with the least complicated formula for success: if you are cracked (at Math), you will get to be in quantitative trading, which should trump all else because of how lucrative it is. It is not simply a call for vocational education, which is too low-status compared to the highly compensated and entirely technical trade of financial investing. It seems like, after some decades of opening society up to exploring the transitional grey area, people are now back to thinking in black and white, that optimization should be unidirectional, and that the “science” that is objective and unfalsifiable should supersede the “art” that can hold many things to be true.
There are aspects of life where I do not believe in things being subjective or relativistic, like my own moral compass, or what is good science, or whether the climate is changing. But more often than not, I am very open to re-evaluating my stance on things and very preferential to moderation. I think, by some political, technological, and socioeconomic forces, the collective risk-aversion has hit an inflection point, wherein things that are known to have long-term potential returns have lost their appeal to the more private, more tangible gains. More people are convinced of the ultimacy of their fields by looking down on others’; more young people are ready to forgo personal development, soft skills, and community-based thinking, perhaps as they believe the pros of riding the AI wave or breaking into high-frequency trading early are too overwhelming to care about much else.
This is not to say that people who are devoted to a technical skill are sociopaths. I personally want to be as dedicated to my scientific venture as I am to uplifting those in my community. Instead, I lament the mounting resistance to empathy and the disavowal of trying to persuade others, which some other might simplify it to social polarization or insularization. Maybe the world is no longer poised to entertain such disquietudes or flexibilities such that we cannot afford to stray away from our one true calling. I wish it is easier to convince people that I am taking a sane position without myself showing that I am a successful, wealthy, and accomplished human being. I think some of the most positive influences in life come from the humblest places that we might have just missed.