Great conversations are what we could say 'fractal', an intricate and non-literal (something that the mind cannot turn legible) combination between order and chaos, like how a river meanders through the ground but always finds its way to the ocean (technically it can pour into a lake but you get the metaphor).
There are two failure modes of this unity. The first is how the mind attempts to impose its own pseudo-unity by having an agenda, an obsessive need for control, a need to get somewhere or something from the conversation. Interviews are pretty much always of this kind. There are questions that the interviewer needs to ask, especially when it comes to public figures who need to have an opinion about everything that happens in our hyper-mediatized times, and which sidestep the conversation no matter where it is going. If a great conversation is like a river, these agenda-driven 'conversations' are like an unnatural canal, a man-made linear structure which attempts to go from point A to point B as quickly as possible, and which necessarily requires an equally artificial and rationally designed environment to exist within in the first place—i.e. canals couldn't exist in nature.
The second failure mode of this unity manifests in the haphazard streams of consciousness produced by the minds of most people. Unable to have thoughts that relate to the situation, their 'conversations' reduce down to associations they had from what the other person just said, even if the topic or the mood changes wildly. "Your argument with your parents reminds me of how when I was a kid I also ..." 1
There is nothing wrong with bringing tangents and switching subjects of course, just like how rivers themselves tend to diverge into distributaries. The problem is not that the conversation changes subject, but rather that the person doing so has no sense whatsoever of the other person and the situation at hand. They change subject not because they feel that it is right to do so, the same way that a funny person knows what is humorous or not given the context at hand, but because they cannot do otherwise. This is the same type of person who dominates conversations by talking far too much, because they are insensitive to the other person, making them unable to feel what is right or not.
The two failure modes of unity are, in general, an externalized objective agenda, like how scientists are so obsessed with their standards of externally verifiable proofs that they essentially ignore the entire human experience in the process, and on the other hand an obsessive subjective self that cannot step outside of itself, in other words it is solipsistic.
What is beyond the objective and the subjective is what Darren Allen calls the panjective, being able to relate to wholeness, in this case the wholeness of the context at hand and in which both people partake. Panjectivity manifests as balance, playfulness, rhythm, humor, and many more qualities, but all of those are an epiphenomenon of the source of panjectivity, which is the contact with Reality, being with the situation as it is, not what I know of it and how I can influence it, (objective) or what I think or feel about it. (subjective)
Let's take balance for instance, in the context of conversations. Some of the people who dominate conversations might be told that they do so, but what might do they do in response? You could imagine someone who tries to remind themselves that they have to let other people in on the conversation, like how people who spend so much time in front of a screen have to remind themselves that they have a body, because it doesn't even register in their experience. In that case, it doesn't really work most of the time, because the source of the issue, the lack of sensitivity to the other, hasn't been addressed. 2
Or you could imagine someone who artificially creates some type of mechanism to get the other person to speak. Here, I am reminded of the top-manager of the department I worked for, who scheduled one (a single one mind you) meeting with some of the people of the department as a 'team-bonding' exercise. The setup consisted in having everyone take turns and share about what they have been doing lately, namely what holidays they went to, which lasted until everyone was done. There was some semblance of exchange as people shared about themselves, it wasn't exactly like a military procedure or anything, but it felt incredibly forced, both in the shape of the interactions, like putting people on a conveyor belt to give each of them a chance to speak, and in the tone.
This approach to conversations is similar to the type of routine design that self-help writers sometimes recommend: removing spontaneity and in its place add a structure within which your energy has to flow. This can be useful in certain narrow situations, but I can hardly imagine truly creative and resonant work to emerge from such a setup, much less an interaction with another person to feel open-hearted, enjoyable and truthful. It's like trying to make love on a script that dictates all of your actions.
And another thing that the people who dominate conversations might try is to lean into the exact opposite: say next to nothing and let the other person speak. This of course doesn't solve the problem, it merely displaces it, but what this points to is that the inability for the self to respond well to its context manifests as two opposite poles, monopolizing the conversation in this case, and saying nothing and retreating inside yourself on the other, neither of which lead to good conversations, which like partner dance requires two people to have an innate lust for life as individuals, in order to have something they want to share about, but also enough interest in one another for the dance to be harmonious.
Another aspect of balance that is missing in poor conversations is silence, which together with speech forms an alternance known as rhythm. In most conversations nowadays, there is a sort of frantic need to say as much as possible constantly, to maintain a subject of attention onto which both participants can focus on. Supposedly this is because people spend so much time on their screen that without such a subject of focus, most would start going on their phone even while they are with someone else.
On top of that, the screen-based world doesn't leave any room for silence and darkness, the mind becoming a brightly-lit room which tries to remove any uncertainty, danger and confusion from its awareness, which inevitably makes anything which isn't intended to be there to register as an existential threat—look at how modern people are afraid of insects to get a sense of that.
Silence is threatening to the obsessive and hard-focusing mind, common in modern times, because it doesn't provide any thing for it to perpetuate itself. Unconsciousness has no other drive than perpetuating itself, because all meaning and quality is found by attending to wholes, which the self-informed self cannot do. There is no beauty in an isolated part, no meaning in an isolated word, no fatefulness in an isolated moment, no humor in an isolated joke, and no joy in any isolated thing, which is why the mind which can only look at the world as discrete, atomized things concludes that there is no meaning, no beauty, no love, no quality anywhere.
What such a mind does as a response is think, and think, and think, as a way to distract itself from its fundamental existential alienation. One of the major reasons why so many people have a purely associative mind, the kind that leads to the oh-that-reminds-me-of types of 'conversations' where two people exchange their streams of consciousness, is because they cannot find the stillness from which conscious thinking happens, because such a stillness is essentially death to the unconscious self. And without that stillness, the mind becomes a machine that runs on auto-pilot, rather than a tool that we can use deliberately.
The reason why so many people are poor at conversations is because they have become machines, and why would anyone want to talk to a set of predictable scripts? Today we find that some people are actually talking to a machine, a large language model to be more precise, which are certainly far more sophisticated than a mere decision tree with canned responses, and yet there is something which is evidently missing, even if it cannot be articulated in literal terms.
The gap between a machine and a conscious person is fundamentally beyond literality, because mechanicalness is itself literal. It arises from treating Reality as a series of discrete bits which relate with one another causally, a mode of perception which is useful in narrow situations, but which cannot describe the whole of Reality, namely its unity and its paradoxical, non-caused nature.
The three most obvious aspects in which people have become mechanical in their conversations is firstly, in the choice of subjects, which are by and large clichés, secondly, in how those subjects link with one another through predictable scripts, and thirdly, in their flattened expression, lack of musicality in their speech due to a monotonous voice, dullness of facial expression, repressed laughter, that type of thing.
The self-informed self cannot help but think and talk about clichés, because all uniqueness requires one to be in touch with the uniqueness of the present moment. Only the present moment is unique, because the past fossilizes into our memories, and the future is distorted by our projections and fantasies, both of which are the products of our mind, which represents rather than faithfully perceives Reality.
This is why many authors nowadays tell us that nothing is truly original, because they themselves aren't able to perceive true uniqueness, and instead focus on the purely formal aspects, which are indeed inspired by other forms. Every artist takes many, many things from other artists—if they try to step away from tradition altogether they are basically guaranteed to be trivial—but the truly great artist is able to bring something beyond all of those, his own quality, which is what allows us to distinguish Shakespeare from all other playwrights, Bach from all other composers, and a conversation with our lover from all other conversations. 3
If clichés are the bits, then scripts are the things that connect them to one another. The mind of most people has become like a series of tunnels that connect their impressions with their stereotypical responses, through an avenue which is both hyper-efficient at going from point A to point B, but also unable to take in the context, leading people to speak and live on a script.
You can see the extent to which people are unconscious by how they react when something unexpected is said. By and large, the default response is a confused, sometimes horrified silence, or an awkward laugh, followed by a transition to going back to "business as usual". This happens in conversations for all types of subjects, from the casual and innocent observations that a child makes about people and the world—who are by and large far more discerning than most adults—to the serious possibility that the system we live in is on its last legs, there is always a need for an unconscious self to get back to a safe and predictable subject of conversation.
Even politics is by and large a way for people to exchange clichés with one another. It might appear different from most other subjects of conversation in modern life, because it deals with more (emotionally) difficult subjects, but it is really just a facade at the end of the day, because people do not think, or accept, or much less act when engaging with politics, they just regurgitate opinions which they have barely chewed on.
For the third and final aspect of machine conversation, flattened expression is a direct consequence of living in a purely utilitarian society, which itself is the inevitable result of a self which cannot do anything but perpetuate itself, which therefore makes it seek continual improvement in its ability to do so—self-perpetuation in the short-term at least, for every civilization eventually collapses.
This is why speech and faces have become so expressionless, particularly in the middle and upper classes, because only people who aren't very conscious to begin with can function well in our system, because they don't have to fight against themselves to prioritize the needs of the institution, or the company, they have to work for.
You can go to work and make lots of money in our world without any of your qualities as a conscious person being needed, because as a whole the system is mechanical, unconscious, and therefore undiscerning of quality. All work within the system becomes soulless, which doesn't just manifest in the horrible decline of artistic quality, but in the even more horrifying fact that no one cares. There is only slop, and no one minds it. Similarly, only those who are conscious can even notice that something is wrong with the lack of any meaningful expression in conversations nowadays, because unconsciousness doesn't appear as such to itself, it appears instead as normal, reasonable, pragmatic, rational.
We live in a world of rational death, which is why most conversations are worse than physical pain for conscious people, because they reveal the emptiness of the world that is in front of us. The world dies out not with a bang, but with a deadpan expression, which is why collapse in many ways is boring. 4
1 Incidentally this is why I disable comments on my Substack, and host a website here with no interaction whatsoever—on top of the fact that it makes it very easy to host and run: just upload html files to a server, and voila. Most of the time, people blurt out whatever stream of consciousness was happening to them while they were reading a piece, instead of commenting something that adds to the conversation, or asking good questions, which means that I have to spend time and energy deciphering whatever they wrote—sometimes they themselves do not know what they wrote!—which in the vast majority of cases is a waste of time because there isn’t much substance there. So for the sake of practicality, and quite frankly my soul, I disable comments. I hope you understand.
2 More often than not, what is required is a serious issue in their relationships, such as a breakup, a divorce, or a severe problem at work, for them to realize what they haven't been paying attention to. Whether we like it or not, pain is usually what is required for us to change.
3 See also this great piece by Darren Allen on the nature of originality
4 It's also horrifying of course. Right now, we are on the precipice of what might be some of the worst food shortages in the history of humanity—for the simple fact that there are far more of us now than in the past. Our reliance on industrial fertilizers, which themselves are dependent on natural gas by way of the Haber-Bosch process, means that the energy shock due to the Hormuz debacle, and the coming (not guaranteed but very likely) El Nino of this summer, will come together to create real, undeniable shortages in our food supply chains.
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Conversation Panjectivity Darrenallen Nature Balance Silence Musicality Time Essayworthy
2026-05-28