On “Learning How To Listen” And “Learning How To Accept Yourself”
Evaluating a human using social norms is difficult because of many elements that influence his/her personal identitiy.
[Foreword: People are often overly willing to give the “accept yourself” advice, but would be not nearly as willing to tell the advised person which “self” to accept. Because your current self is also your “self”, and the self when you were a kid is also another “yourself”, despite them being polar opposite. What is there to make it so sure that we cannot become better in the future? And why should we accept the “self” that we currently have than striving for a better one in the future?
Another advice that people often give is “Learn how to listen”, but what exactly do they mean by “listen”, to endure just so the speaker could go on and on and on without you really catching a word, or to actually “listen” in a way that helps?
This article shall be comprised of 3 parts, which while may appear disjointed, may actually be just as disjointed as they look.]
1. Regarding language.
It never ceases to surprise me, what language is capable of.
Because while we each have exactly the same set of alphabets to work with, it seems that each of us can always put those limited numbers of characters into expressions so great (or so terrible) it’s mind blowing. The alphabet is perhaps one of the most equitable forms of resource to ever exist, ever since illiteracy was fully eradicated.
People would combine letters into words, and then combine words to form all kinds of things that either have or have never existed in this world. They use them to build up what’s really existing, what’s only existing in their mind, as well as the concepts of “existence” or “mind”.
And for that reason, between a normal person and a philosopher, with the same limited set of characters, one can arrange letters and then words into literally the entire universe, while the other can create about just enough to handle his daily life words.
In a way, things that lie beyond the language’s capacity to express would much likely lie beyond the capacity of our capacity as well. For example, how exactly are you going to define the feeling of sadjasjkhjswklafjsdla? Supposed even if it exists, it would probably be something of the most pointless thing to have if we cannot name it, record it and then communicate it to others. When not yet having for itself a defined spot in the language system, a concept would feel almost like non-existent. Like how the concept of “Democracy” is to a hunter-gatherer society or, to be easier to imagine, the concept of “black hole” to cavemen.
This makes language even more of a miraculous wonder. A language system could be developed from hundreds or thousands years ago, some even older, and yet still function well in modern day society, with little regard for how civilizations after civilizations had thrived and then ceased to exist. Regardless of from which points of time in history were these language systems established, the humankind back in those of course would not have had any way to foresee how they would be used in the future.
The language of math for example, is the wondrous language-of-all-thing that, despite its history of thousands of years, still has its value perfectly intact and still continues to serve mankind in their quest to explore the natural world. Our ancestor had not only managed to create a language of wisdom that transcends time, but also had, by passing down that language, granted humankind of all ages with the ability to explore beyond their current limited knowledge. For example, humans had discovered the black hole not by seeing it somewhere in the galaxy, but instead by realizing the theoretical basis for its existence between the lines of modern physics formula, even prior to telescope technology’s finally becoming advanced enough for humans to see with their own eyes the trace of its existence.
And from this, I had a take for myself. I think (I’m just ‘thinking’ it, ok?) maybe wisdom by itself can be defined as a person’s prowess in utilizing languages to explore (and build) the world. Knowledge, on the other hand, is the methodical and specifically structured arrangement of language, which have been constantly enriched over the thousands of years ever since the dawn of the first civilization. We cannot understand things beyond language’s capacity to express and, even more so certainly, cannot build anything of significant meaning from materials that no one but ourselves individually can understand.
It is thanks to this system, that we can make others understand us, can understand others, and also can recognize what we have yet capable of communicating/understanding.
2. Learning how to listen.
Whenever I read a philosophy book, I would often ask myself how these individual words, while by themselves being so familiar, when put together can create such an alien language that barely feels like anything originated from the Earth. Perhaps it’s because there’s that great of a disparity between my current self’s command of language and that of these classic great minds, and hence my inability to fully understand what they are trying to communicate, just like the powerlessness felt by a grade-schooler facing an advanced mathematics problem.
But contrary to the much perceivable sense of helplessness and compromissory we feel when facing an advanced math problem or a textbook on “Engineering for fuel lines on aircraft carriers”; we are oftentimes a lot denser to our lacking when we deal with philosophy, as more than some of us are always so damn sure that we are and always are capable of understanding every words of Plato in his book Republic. Some people struggle to handle the truth that even if something is translated into their mother tongue, doesn’t mean they can understand it.
And thus, while we would certainly have a much easier time raising the white flag after opening the first few page of the book Engineering for fuel lines on aircraft carriers, it’s not nearly as easy when it comes to a book on philosophy or other types of more abstract wisdoms, readily translated into the same language that you use to read and write: You seem to take it for granted, that you should always be able to understand it. What’s exactly the reason for us to discount the complexity of philosophy, which in truth may as well always trumps that of Engineering for fuel lines on aircraft carriers? The later, even when encoded in thousands of tricky mathematical symbols, could still be easily comprehended when you have learnt all the tools necessary, while philosophical concepts such as ‘the meaning of existence’ on the other hand, can forever remain an uncrackable mystery, even when they are expressed in words and phrases readily comprehensible to us.
In the shoes of mathematic experts, you will come to realize that even the most complicated mathematical problems in the world can have ever so small implication to themselves, as they serve only to serve very small problems or to prove the existence of shockingly basic relationships — relatively small at least, and currently, when compared to what’s being solved using philosophy.
And for that reason, perhaps we should at least feel slightly bothered by those bad habits of ourselves; Like how any of us would never complain about difficulty of a programming instruction video that we find on YouTube (cuz we take that difficult as a given), but would always bombard the writers with angry comments on how difficult and reader-unfriendly the writing is in articles that discuss highly sophisticated intellectual topics (cuz we always expect that topic to be easily understandable). Lots of us can willing accept the fact that our failure in comprehending an instruction video on programming is just the matter of fundamental knowledge shortage, but at the same time can fail to realize that the difficulty in reading a piece of philosophical/literature writing can be due to the exact same reason, and thus find “Write it more readable please” an absolutely reasonable demand when made to a writer of intellectual pieces.
Unlike fields of natural science where the language barriers are clearly perceivable; social intellect are more than often expressed in the exact same characters we use to bargain for a kilo of fish or vegetable at the markets (or the mundane things along those lines), causing us to become severely dense to our own shortcomings when engaging in one of those intellectual conversations. For that reason, in those conversations, the problems most of the time lie with the listener rather than the speaker. Or, to put it more precisely, the problems who lie with those who listen while never know how to properly do so.
The advice on learning how to listen has always been packed within the scope of conversations, in the form of something along this line: “you should talk less and let the other person talk more”. And that’s not the type of listening we wish to discuss here: By “knowing how to listen”, we mean you “know how to properly utilize language so you can properly understand the others have to say, and even more so importantly, what you yourself are saying.
In my quest for knowledge, as well as in the course of my communication with those who are more seasoned than me in this journey, I realized that all of us more or less took somewhat similar courses in doing so: From “working to understand what others are saying”, to “working to identify where those messages place within the knowledge architecture”, and lastly toward “protecting ourselves from getting influenced by deliberately misinterpreted knowledge”.
For example, when reading articles from Monster Box or those from great scholars, or when simply trying to familiarize ourselves with knowledge by reading books… the joyous feeling when you finally catch the meaning between the lines will always be hardly describable in words. So to find that sensation, instead of just finding for yourself unlimited desperation from facing knowledge completely beyond your level, you will first have to build for yourself a foundation of fundamental knowledge and terminologies. As written language requires coherence, to one extent or another, the writer would always have to use the word “identity” when referring to the concept of identity, instead of repeating its definition at every turn to cater for the ignorant.
To equip yourself with (correct) background knowledge before approaching a field of studies is also a measure to protect yourself. It will help you tell apart which articles are not worth reading, which arguments are completely wrong, and which conclusion should be entirely ignored. This is also the way for us to recognize the utter uselessness (for our self-improvement) of self-help books, the selling point of which most lie with the charisma of the writers rather than the quality of messages that they actually give.
But the beauty of proper listening does not only lie with its usefulness in our quest for knowledge. Because, let’s be frank, in the long run, it’s not that, but instead to understand and thus cohabit better with those around us, that would truly be our lifelong concern; and we believe proper listening is greatly helpful in that regard as well.
There is one thing that makes the ability to listen so special: it’s a passive ability.
It is indeed so, because, no matter in what way you see it, we would always learn quicker how to control our speech, but would also struggle a lot more in learning to control what we hear as most of what we listen to comes from the environment around us and not ourselves. And for that reason, it would always be the better bet to learn how to better react to what we hear than how to ignore the things we wish not to hear or how to force people to not say them.
With the same limited number of characters in the Indian alphabet, Tagore managed to write collections and collections of love poems that can make readers from all around the world burst into tears even after those pieces were translated. Nguyen Nhat Anh is also using pretty much the same words and language we always use in our conversation to create one collection after another of short stories, the beauty of which almost feel timeless as they never fail to captivate any generation of Vietnamese youths. And then apart from its good purpose, language can be used with bad intention as well — and it seems that regardless of the age we’re in, there’d always be plenty of people who look to do so.
One method for that would be to deceptively arrange words and phrases for fraudulent, propagandistic or manipulative purposes. And also for people to stir up negative emotions toward each other. Thus, if we don’t know how to listen properly, we’ll easily get swayed by others’ deceptive use of language.
The results, for example, could be how our negative feelings often mount up at an uncontrollable rate when getting bombarded by snarky questions of our relatives during a Tet family gathering. The feelings that, even when we’ve told ourselves not to succumb to, would still burst out anyway when even the slightest movement of the air can sound like a meaningful word of mockery in our ears. On a larger scale, and more intensively so, the manipulative power of word choices also presents in the speeches of strangers we meet on the social networks, or our acquaintances (friends, colleagues, neighbors, relatives, etc.) in real life.
Nothing can be worse than having everything you do in your life completely at the mercy of those manipulative language for literally every day until the end of it. And thus, you have to learn how to listen properly, because by doing so you are liberating your emotions, both positive and negative, from being controlled by the phrasing of others around you.
Once you have, to some extent, mastered the use of language as well as developed a certain basis of knowledge, your defense against deceptive phrasing in other speech would in turn be developed and bolstered. The ability to stay calm before worthless mockery, the immunity against toxic language or the mental shield to keep ourselves from faltering against baseless, superstitious threats — despite how frequently they got thrown at us — those are the things that we should quickly create for ourselves.
It would be such a tall order to turn yourself into Diogenes or Seneca, but there is one thing for certain: Every bit of knowledge you learn in everyday life does operate the same way as the knowledge you learn in the career you are pursuing: The more the needed things you learn, the more capable you will become at recognizing the things that needn’t be learned. The secrets to how to not involve yourself in gossip about the private life of others is in fact just like that to how a good programmer teaches himself to automatically ignore the internet-swarming instructions on how to h.a.c.k Facebook accounts; and those secrets can naturally be learned.
So, learning how to listen properly is about learning how to protect yourself from being manipulated by what’s said by others, both philosophically and emotionally; and it’s also about how to overcome the weaknesses you have in your process of passive receipt of information. You will see how crucial this is, if you think about the many uncontrollable risks that can be lurking in the long-run future throughout the course of your life.
And for that reason, even when it is wrong of people constantly trying to sniff around your private life, it doesn’t make it a good thing for you to get angry at them, and even less so does that reaction of yours help with preserving a peaceful atmosphere for everyone.
3. Learn to be careful with what you “have already known”.
Almost all concerns and sorrows felt by us humans stem from our tendency to assume ourselves to know more than we really do. That’s my 2 cents.
Of course the issue wouldn’t be as self-evident as how a blabbering fellow would talk like he’s some kind of business guru even when everybody else knows he has never achieved anything worthy of mentioning; the trap is in most case so subtle that would only realize after we literally break bones falling into it. Or maybe we won’t be able, even after that.
For example, in the case of language, literacy by itself has become a hurdle making it difficult for people to accept that they are incapable of understand some certain thing even when they are presented In verbal language. In a similar manner, universal literacy can sometimes cause people to underappreciate the profession of a writer. So when we tell our Vietnamese audiences how big of a gap there exists between being fluent in Russian and being capable of writing masterpieces like War and Peace, they would have an easy time imagining that and thus agree to it. But if we say that same gap exists between being fluent in Vietnamese and being capable of writing a decent article, most people would struggle to see how that could be the case.
And the list of similar misassumptions of knowing would just keep go on and on: for those who have children to assume they know how to parent properly; for those being born as human to assume they naturally should know how human societies; for those being capable of thinking to assume they know how to think properly; for those capable of making choice to assume they know how to make choice properly; for those capable of talking to assume they know how to talk properly; for those with lots of money to assume they know how to act like someone from high society, etc. On a narrower scale, sometimes we ourselves could mis-assume that we already know how to properly eat, walk or dress … just because it has never become a concern in the past.
Indeed, dressing is a great example for how we humans can do a certain thing years after years without knowing what it is about or how to do it properly. Even the most ordinary dining or dressing rules can catch most of us completely amazed and shocked when we actually work to learn them for once. The eureka moment when you finally gain the proper understanding on things that we’ve been misunderstanding for nearly our entire life, and when you finally realize how inefficient (though not necessary wrongful) everything you do in your life has always been, and how they can be improved is also among most valuable experience that youth can offer (especially when it can help you get over the depressing “if only” feelings).
However, whether it’s small habits or more advanced capacity, there always exists a grey zone which could bluff us into believing that the way we’ve been doing is optimal and there’s nothing left to be worried about. And this is almost shocking to watch, given how we are always so quick to recognize our shortcomings and helplessness in the more characteristically-social activities like our studies or occupation.
So maybe it’s the case for us to only recognize the difficulties in the things we are assigned to do, and the weakness of ourselves in learning the things we are. The fact that we’re not assigned to do or learn something, tragically enough, can doom us with the lack of information and thus render us unable to see how incapable we are not doing or learning those things. Take sex for example: strangely enough, most people would claim themselves to be expert at the matter even when hardly any people has that much first hand experience with it.
4. Should we really “accept ourselves”?
The habit of maintaining a critical and open mind on our own capacity within the context of society can help us out in many ways. For example, to keep a level of skepticism toward all of the skills of which we have always considered ourselves the masters (such as eloquence, dressing and dining codes, openness to new knowledge and experience) is one of the most crucial steps for us to change ourselves for the better and thus help us gain great advantages in areas of social life where the proficiency at those skills are greatly appreciated. This mindset can also help us understand the difficulties that exist in the learning and performing of each kind of skill/occupation, and thus help us better appreciate the hard work of other people around us.
The adoption of an objective standard can also help to keep us from wastefully succumbing to the supposedly-conquerable devils that reside in our current selves. And so that one day when our present self becomes our past self and we have the chance to look back at it, we’ll find flaws after flaws literally everywhere in it, from how we dress ourselves, how we talk, how we think, how we handle our relationships, how our personality was, we would truly feel grateful that we choose to change, and thus everything has changed for the better overtime.
When looking at their current self, a lot of us would struggle to not be overly, pathologically critical about it, but it is exactly then that the introduction of an objective standard could be the saving grace that we need. Like how a research students identify where they’re at on the path of academia, or how a aspired young athletes identify how far they still are away from the professional level, or how a fresh graduates can pinpoint the areas where they need improvement in order to become job-worthy (by benchmarking what they currently have with what required by the society), to have an objective standard is always a great way to keep ourselves from getting overly opti- or pessimistic. But of course there’s still a lot more packed within the simple phrase of “self-recognition” cannot be fully elaborated with this article or even with many other articles.
But on the other hand, the adherence to the systems of principles when paired with the will for betterment could also expose you to the risk of falling into the trap that is social stereotypes. The more popular standards and ways of life can, in many cases, be suitable only for a very small proportion of the population. And even when pretty much everyone from every age would strive for the better, it was certainly a fact that most of them ended with a life worse than the expectancy the had for it. Mathematically speaking, perhaps the large majority of the parents of those who are reading this article had lived that not-as-good life. But the question is, does that matter?
Personality and view of life, along with the many and many other micro factors that make up our self, are at the mercy of the environment, and sometimes they can get beaten into us so hard they feel too deep-rooted to be changeable. It is the truth that the fate we did not want to be born with, the personality of ourselves we loath ever so much, along with many and many bad habits that we would love to trade for anything else any day… they are all us, the things that people see when they look at us, and not something so alien to us that we can just make disappear by wishing it not to be there.
Thus, the adherence to the systems of principles and the will for betterment but without a reasonable consideration on the plausibility to achieve that higher standard (with often time depends on factors beyond our control) can bite back at us as it trap us in the state of constant discontentment, causing us to reject the identity of our own as well as of others, or develop unhealthy expectation for betterment (for example, trying to achieve same success as those who own their success largely to their environment). For example, a toxic obsession toward politeness in daily conversations, or a toxic obsession toward rationality in each piece of our verbal communication, can lead you to grow to loathe literally every single person you meet in your daily life, including the strangers you meet on the way or in the market, the colleagues at work, or even your own parents, while worshiping strangers who doesn’t help or even has anything whatsoever to do with your actual life.
And, as we said, in the end, if your final purpose is to cohabit better with others as well as your own self, the pursuit of aristocrats’ standards would bring you more harm than good (at least for the time being). And that’s without considering whether those standards are actually helpful or necessary in anyway at all. For the younger generations who still have a lot of rooms to develop and, hence, to “change thy fate”, the said sense of helplessness might be somewhat of an alien feeling, but for those who already reached the later stages of their life, things would be different.
So at the end of the day, the question still remains: should we or should we not, with all things considered, accept ourselves the way it currently is?
The answer can only be found by yourself. However, just remember, this article already armed you with everything you need to keep a critical mind on it, whatever the choice you’re making.
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Further Reading:
- Self-Consciousness: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness/
- Language: https://www.britannica.com/topic/language
- Theory of Mind, Emotion Understanding, Language, and Family Background: Individual Differences and Interrelations: https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/.../1467-8624.00061
- Cognitive Linguistics and Linguistic Relativity: https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/.../oxfordhb...
- Black hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole
