We Don’t Have a Connection Problem. We Have a Noticing Problem

We often hear that we have a connection problem. People are lonely, conversations are becoming harder to start, and social media has changed the way we interact. Many of us can feel surrounded by people while somehow becoming less connected to them. I understand why we describe it that way, but the more I think about it, the less convinced I am that connection itself is the problem. Perhaps we have a noticing problem.

We have more opportunities to connect than any generation before us. We can speak to someone on the other side of the world almost instantly, find communities built around almost any interest and discover an extraordinary amount about people we’ve never met. Yet at the same time, we can spend years around people without ever becoming curious about who they really are. We recognise their faces, know where they work and perhaps even know what they usually order for lunch, but none of that necessarily means we’ve noticed them.

When I was growing up, noticing people wasn’t something I thought about. It was simply part of everyday life. You waited for a bus and noticed who else was waiting. You visited a friend without knowing whether they would be home. You spoke to the person behind the counter because there wasn’t another way to get what you needed. People were part of the environment around us, and because there was less information competing for our attention, we often had more reason to pay attention to them.

My hearing loss probably made me notice things differently. From a young age, I couldn’t always rely on hearing every word in a conversation, so I became more attentive to everything happening around it. Expressions, body language, pauses, hesitation and the way someone reacted to a question could sometimes tell me as much as the words themselves. I wasn’t deliberately studying people. I was simply trying to understand what was happening, but over time that way of observing became something I carried with me.

The more I think about it now, the more I realise that noticing isn’t necessarily about seeing something unusual. Quite often, it’s about looking at something ordinary for long enough to realise that there is more to it than you first assumed. The person who always brings homemade biscuits to work might know the secret to making a great bolognaise. The quiet bloke in the office might have spent twenty years restoring old motorbikes. The woman who seems to know everybody’s name might have gone on safari in Africa and have a collection of stories that would completely change the way you saw her. None of those things are visible when you first meet someone. They only become interesting once you’re curious enough to look beyond the obvious.

That’s what I’ve always found fascinating about people. We make quick assessments because we have to. We see someone’s clothes, their job, their accent, their confidence or the way they carry themselves and our minds immediately begin filling in the gaps. The problem isn’t that we make those first impressions. The problem is that we sometimes mistake them for knowledge. Noticing asks us to leave a little room for being wrong.

Someone who seems serious might have an unexpectedly ridiculous sense of humour. Someone who appears confident might be quietly nervous. Someone who doesn’t say much in a group might simply have spent years learning that they have something more interesting to say when somebody actually asks them a question. The person we think we understand in thirty seconds may turn out to be considerably more interesting once we give them another thirty minutes. Sometimes the difference between a passing acquaintance and a genuinely interesting person is simply that someone cared enough to keep asking.

This is where I think our modern idea of connection has become slightly confused. We have started measuring connection by how many people we can reach rather than how much attention we give to the people already within reach. We can follow hundreds of people without knowing any of them, receive constant updates from people we’ve never met and spend hours discussing the lives of strangers while knowing surprisingly little about the people we encounter every day. Being connected isn’t necessarily the same as being interested, and being interested isn’t necessarily the same as noticing.

Noticing begins with curiosity, and curiosity often starts with remembering something small. It might mean remembering that someone mentioned they were learning another language and asking how they’re getting on. It might mean asking a colleague why they became interested in something rather than simply asking what they do for work. It might mean discovering that the person who spends every Saturday repairing things around their house can identify almost any bird by its call. These aren’t extraordinary acts of friendship. They’re simply small signs that we were paying enough attention to remember something about another person.

I’ve often written about saying hello because I think we’ve made the beginning of conversation far more complicated than it needs to be. We search for the perfect opening question, worry about making the wrong impression and sometimes convince ourselves that other people aren’t interested in talking. Yet perhaps we’re starting too late in the process. Before we can become curious about someone, we have to notice them as more than part of the scenery.

That is why I don’t think the answer to our supposed connection problem is simply teaching people better conversation techniques. A perfect question asked without genuine curiosity is still just a question. The most ordinary question in the world can become the beginning of a remarkable conversation when someone genuinely wants to know the answer. Some of the best conversations I’ve ever had began with questions that weren’t clever or rehearsed. They simply came from wanting to know a little more about the person standing in front of me.

We also tend to think of noticing as something we do for other people, but I don’t think it works that way. Sometimes noticing changes our own lives because it allows us to recognise things we would otherwise walk past. An opportunity can look like an inconvenience. A new friendship can begin as an awkward conversation. A new interest can start with something we never expected to enjoy. Even a change in direction can be difficult to recognise while we’re standing in the middle of it. We often understand the significance of something only after we’ve had enough distance to see what it was really doing to our lives.

That’s something travel taught me, but I don’t think we need to travel to experience it. The unknown exists in ordinary life as well. We simply become less likely to look for it once everything around us becomes familiar. The same café, the same route to work, the same people and the same routines can create the illusion that we’ve already seen everything there is to see. Familiarity can be useful, but it can also quietly convince us that there is nothing left to discover.

I’ve spent much of my life being drawn towards the unknown, but writing my memoir eventually made me realise that some of the most interesting discoveries weren’t places I had travelled to. They were observations I had overlooked while I was living the moment. Years later, when I finally stepped back from those experiences, I began seeing connections and patterns that had been there all along. The people, conversations and small moments hadn’t changed. I had simply changed the way I was looking at them.

That’s what makes noticing different from simply looking. Looking is something we can do without really thinking about it. Noticing requires us to become curious about what we’re seeing and to remain open to discovering that our first impression might not have been the whole story. Sometimes that discovery happens immediately. Sometimes it takes years.

We don’t necessarily need more people in our lives. We may need to pay more attention to the people already in them. We don’t necessarily need better ways to introduce ourselves. We may need to become more interested in the people who have already introduced themselves to us. And we don’t necessarily need another way to discover what strangers are doing online. Sometimes we might simply need to become curious about the person we’ve seen a hundred times but never really met.

The most interesting person in the room doesn’t always look interesting when they walk through the door. Their story may not announce itself, and it might be hidden behind an ordinary job, an ordinary appearance or an ordinary answer to an ordinary question. We only discover it when we give them enough attention for the ordinary introduction to become something more.

Perhaps that’s why I don’t think we have a connection problem after all. We have people everywhere, and we have more ways to communicate than we’ve ever had. What we sometimes lack is the curiosity to stop treating the people around us as background and start wondering what we might discover if we paid a little more attention.

Maybe the next great conversation isn’t waiting for us somewhere else. It might already be sitting beside us, working next to us, living across the road or standing in the same queue. We may not need to find more people. We might simply need to notice the ones we’ve been looking at all along.

Topics:

#Noticing #HumanConnection #Authenticity #Socialising #Curiosity #Conversation #SayingHello #HumanBehaviour #SocialConnection #ModernLife #Observation #Connection #DJBifford #NoIWontBuyYouADrink