i've been spending about four cumulative hours a week speaking to people in voice chats, and i think i'm losing my ability to speak and socialize properly. i don't use much social media and i don't use spying messaging apps like facebook, snapchat, etc. and now that i've gone months without a face-to-face conversation, i'm realizing the powerful utility of conversations

conversations are useful to maintain and build knowledge about things in different areas. the areas that come to my mind are ones about social justice, about professional skills, about academic interests, and about hobbies.

but conversations are gone, and articles have to take the place of conversation. concurrently, i'm starting to feel i cannot possibly keep up in any one of these areas, let alone all of them.

four months ago i asked here why socialism is a good idea, and i got a lot of really good and thorough replies explaining why, and some recommendations for further reading. i looked at these readings, and while it all looked very good, they were all firmly planted in my Reading List which i will probably never actually get through

and even then, that is one drop in the bucket! so many things to know, to keep up with! how would that work?

i got a lot of utility conversations. in that example, my areas of ignorance were laid out and light was shone on them from different perspectives. i'm starting to realize that, when both parties are capable of conversing, the total sum of effort required to transfer knowledge is less during a conversation than it is for one party to write knowledge, and the other party to seek and read it.

i'm starting to forget how to converse. i was not particularly good at it, but now i'm getting worse, and i'm starting to understand the structure of conversations as i see and feel my ability to connect with other humans atrophy. conversations allow this natural exploration of concepts, some kind of wonderful form of exploring. it's probably who so many Brands are active on the internet, tweeting and whatnot.

i used to derive a lot of philisophical knowledge from conversing with myself. this was when i was young, and it was really just building basic critical thinking skills and other simple stuff. i think i actually derived utilitarianism as my core philosophy, so i was pretty jazzed to learn it had a name and it had some support behind it. i also recall learning some greek dude thought "if you have enough time, you can derive everything that happens in the universe if you just think really hard." even if that might be true, i feel that it's practically bullshit. there's a lot of useful things to know that you can never derive from scratch on your own.

the many small conversations we partake in in life really add up, and their absence sucks. i'm checking facebook and twitter more often lately, but still most of my learning comes from reading articles, and to a lesser extent, listening to podcasts and watching documentaries. i don't feel like i'm rolling a big boulder up a hill, i feel like i'm trying to keep loose sand in the shape of a hill, but the pile of sand is just too large to fit my hands around. at least the sand is nice and warm, and fun to hold in my hands. but sand doesn't taste very good, so i can't recommend it