5 June

Is the purpose of language really to communicate? If you say to your partner, “I love you”, and they say “I know, you told me yesterday”, you’d probably think something was wrong. Language is probably always like that I think. On the surface it looks like communication, but actually we’re always trying to *do* something when we ‘communicate’, to achieve some end. Not cynically, not tricking. The best listeners and communicators aren’t really listening to details, they’re listening to what’s ‘really going on’ in the person speaking, what they’re feeling for example. Ditto for FB posts, you can read them as information, but really every time a person communicates something, they’re trying to achieve some end. It can transform communication when you stop seeing it as the transfer of information.