One of the problems I am starting to see over and over again is the inability to recognize when someone has heard you.

When someone communicates something that they consider a contentious piece of information to another, there is doubt that the information was even heard so there is a tendency to repeat the information ad nauseum until someone manages to communicate back that they've heard the original message and sometimes the original messenger never hears what they consider acknowledgement that the message was heard.

Let me give an example. Consider two individuals A and B. A has a bad habit, or believes something that B doesn't like. So B will try to let A know that A's belief or behavior is wrong/bad. So A may indeed suffer from cognitive dissonance and simply doesn't believe or denies A's opinion and continues as per normal for A.

B witnesses no change in A's behavior or beliefs so B repeats the message. A may start to hear B's message but displays no visible change and B may not observe what B considers an acknowledgement of hearing the information.

So B continues to repeat the message over and over again.

A may get sick of hearing the message and start tuning B out because the noise is overwhelming, heard the message and disagrees on their position or their assumptions, may have tried to tell A this message but B didn't get their message so continues to reiterate B's message.

B may or may not have a valid and useful message for A. A may actually hear the message and agreed and decided to change their belief or behavior but B may never receive the acknowledgment from A that A agrees, and hence B is deaf to A now and assumes A is universally deaf to B. Or A may be embarrassed about this message and may not want to acknowledge they were wrong or their behavior was bad.

I think it is fair to say that you may have to repeat a message several times before the recipient of the message can possibly hear you, but there has to be a point when you stop repeating the message because there is no way for you to hear them acknowledge your message, you are now deaf to them yourself.

You have to remember that no one will hear your message unless they want to hear it. And as Einstein said to have said: Insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. It is possible you yourself are deaf.

I actually hate the words of this picture - and I think it's cruel. Indeed, I think the words should read instead:

If you are brave enough to suicide, are you brave enough to reach out? Because there is someone out there that needs you as much as you need them. Be brave you are needed.

We are taught from a young age to be distrustful of strangers and sometimes those who are closest to us can be selfish and the last person/people we'd like to reach out to. Reaching out and trust requires vulnerability. There is reason to be cautious about disclosing our vulnerability because people may take advantage of it, but they may not. Most people aren't sociopaths, although we do know they exist, but they are more likely to be CEOs rather than janitors and are no more than about 4% of the population. So we have to be brave enough to overcome those fears. This is a big problem because TV is constantly telling us about people being murdered by neighbors, friends and family all the time and this is not true. Child abduction is down and murder rates are down in general.

All of us feel lonely to some degree, we all need friends, we all need help, we all need to be useful, feel like we are contributing, we all need each other.

But there are different reasons for suicide, no one should blame someone living with a terminal disease for ending the pain.

"The only thing we've found to make the emptiness bearable is each other."

People trying to end it all, suddenly realize when they are jumping off the golden gate bridge that all that seemed unfixable could be fixed if only they hadn't jumped.

We all do need each other and TV teaches us not to trust anyone but we must make the effort to reach out to others who are alone and hurting whether it is simply to help elderly people with their garden or kids with their homework. Our brains are hardwired to search for human faces.

You're not alone and you are needed.

I was in some groups recently that were all about changing society and building stronger and happier communities and I noticed a couple of posts. One was referring to people who were "less than white" and the other was sexist.

In the "less than white post" I wasn't taken seriously at all when I objected to the wording, instead I got a giant "fart" picture which was meant to be about perspective. When I asked well how do you feel about being treated like no one important or less than others, they all saw that as shameful yet couldn't even see that just assuming someone was "less than white" would be anything but perfectly acceptable way to describe others. I think in the end the author of the post meant: different, but words definitely matter. Another person told me that white people were also the victim of racism, but the author is living in the US, the group is primarily white and also the culture.

I was appalled.

Secondly the sexist post I was told by man after man after man that the post wasn't sexist. Mob rules.

A better community - I think not.

But I began to think this was an Orwellian move or perhaps it brings out the conspiracy theorist in me. You see people spend their time talking to others to be told to adhere to the status quo. Yet people join hoping to create a better world - perhaps they will get their better world by having a community of people who all think exactly alike and while it is nice to live in an echo chamber it is not changing anything.

This is where I get to the conspiracy theory, if you want to change the world what better than to join a group of like minded people - there you can be monitored for your level of dissidence and spin your wheels not actually achieving anything and in the process merely reinforce the status quo. So basically these groups on facebook, and these particular groups aren't the only ones, are just to ossify dissatisfaction with the current world.

It is not until we really challenge ourselves will we truly change. And that society's fabric starts with how we treat other people. We should start with the premise that we are all equal.

We are animals and as much as like to think we aren't,  we are.  If you think there was some designer, then that designer did a hell of a lot of cheating, because we not only share a lot of our DNA with monkeys,  we also share much of it with other mammals all the way down to our skeleton which we share with invertebrates. Even trees share much of our DNA. There are modifications here and there but the similarity is unmistakable, even and including how women give birth, just like other mammals.

We are animals because we need to do things other animals do, like sleep, eat, we have a powerful urge to mate and reproduce to pass our genes on. We need sunlight and nature and use the bathroom.

Because we depend on our environment we must care for the environment as a means of caring for ourselves. We depend on our atmosphere to protect us from radiation and to breathe. We depend on plants to produce oxygen and recycle our carbon dioxide. We must live in a symbiotic relationship with the environment but we don't. We pretend it is purely at our disposal.

This is because our brain is so powerful.  We have developed stories that are fantasies about our origins, such as believing we were created distinct from other animals because we somehow think we are special and thus these stories a tapestry of superstitions that are religion.

We depend on each other completely for our understanding of reality that we need contact with other human beings for our sanity and these stories we tell each other shape us into who we are.

We are clever animals who have evolved hands to be able to craft and utilize tools. We have also learned the value of communicating, storing and sharing information.  Indeed, some of our landmark discoveries has been the storing and transmission of information,  cave paintings,  the Gutenberg press, math, telegraph, cinema, radio, television, computers and the Internet. 

But our experience of reality depends largely on who and what we believe.  And knowing what is fiction can be difficult if we believe it. It's nearly impossible to find the flaws in our own thinking (or believing) and this can make it difficult to communicate with others who don't believe what we believe. It's nearly impossible to be objective enough to see our own hypocrisy, even when we are aware we may have flaws in our own thinking. Since we attach so much importance to sanity it can be deeply distressing to find out our beliefs are wrong.

I used to know a born again Christian who delighted in telling me about her favorite t-shirt which said: Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven. She didn't realize this was her license to be completely immoral.