You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters by Kate Murphy

“As I gradually restore Words Like Silver to its archive of reviews written between 2011 and 2024, I'll aim to first and foremost make my reading history explorable by publishing the blurbs and short reflections as books cross my mind, with the goal of eventually transferring and fleshing out the original WLS content. For now, please enjoy this brief spotlight.”

You're Not Listening is New York Times contributor Kate Murphy's eye-opening wake-up call about the worldwide epidemic of not listening.

"If you're like most people, you don't listen as often or as well as you'd like. There's no one better qualified than a talented journalist to introduce you to the right mindset and skillset--and this book does it with science and humor."—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take

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Despite living in a world where technology allows constant digital communication and opportunities to connect, it seems no one is really listening or even knows how. And it's making us lonelier, more isolated, and less tolerant than ever before. A listener by trade, New York Times contributor Kate Murphy wanted to know how we got here.

In this always illuminating and often humorous deep dive, Murphy explains why we're not listening, what it's doing to us, and how we can reverse the trend. She makes accessible the psychology, neuroscience, and sociology of listening while also introducing us to some of the best listeners out there (including a CIA agent, focus group moderator, bartender, radio producer, and top furniture salesman). Equal parts cultural observation, scientific exploration, and rousing call to action that's full of practical advice, You're Not Listening is to listening what Susan Cain's Quiet was to introversion. It's time to stop talking and start listening.

You’ve definitely heard the buzz words “attention economy” before. Heard rants about how phones are ruining our ability to connect with each other, dividing our focus. I’ve read a ton this year about digital minimalism, and deep work, and all that jazz. (And I’ve navigated about twenty two years of people telling me that I’m intense or don’t talk enough when I’m in a group.)

But even acknowledging all the drains on our attention — the willpower required to yank ourselves away from devices, to make time in a culture that prioritizes “busyness,” to avoid the temptation of dulling our senses and our thoughts in a myriad of ways — we’re pretty bad at dialing in when it matters. Even if you’re well-rested, and curious, it’s still difficult to listen in the ways that matter. In general, we hear a ton about how our generation lacks meaningful social connection, or feels really isolated on a day-to-day basis, and this is a book that genuinely offers a strong portrait of ways we can be intentional about shifting that.

It’s SO satisfying to leave a conversation feeling fulfilled, like you deeply connected to the person across from you. Even more so when it’s a complete surprise, someone not in your orbit. As the book suggests, savoring those moments of “I’ve never told anyone else that before.” As much as we want to share ourselves with other people, it feels really good to be a place for someone else to reveal themselves. To a certain extent, I think that also involves the simple belief that everyone you talk to has something to offer you rather than being an interchangeable presence.

“When you listen and really ‘get’ what another person is saying, your brain waves and those of the speaker are literally in sync.”

Whenever I’d love to be better at something, I read a book about it. I don’t particularly enjoy self-help books — the how of it — but love to read about the wby. I’d rather someone tell me how listening developed in our culture and how our brains respond to different types of conversations than a pithy collection of suggestions for how to be better engaged. If I understand why something works, I’m generally a lot better at getting myself to do it. And as this book emphasizes, who you listen to directly impacts how you think and react — might seem obvious, but we lose sight of how important that is.

It was a thorough and invested overview that didn’t feel gimmicky. It was detailed while still containing some thoughtful generalities.

I loved the way that You’re Not Listening was structured; each chapter tackled a different angle of listening — how our brain waves sync up when we’re genuinely lost in a conversation, the fight-or-flight response of having your assumptions challenged, the absurdity of conversations with little kids, qualitative research vs. Big Data, etc,. I hadn’t fully considered how many variations of listening there were.

And there were other sections of the book I loved too. Did you know that one ear is better for listening to emotional problems than the other? Or that your inner voice narrating your day (which not everybody has!) actually mimics the way that other people talk to you? Or that any silence longer than four seconds in the U.S. is automatically assumed to be disapproving?

There’s a lot of truth in here that I’d never seen articulated before, but can go back and apply to my previous conversations. There’s also a lot of uncomfortable truth in here. Like, I will fidget my entire way through a conversation, and I’d like to think that it doesn’t mean I’m a shitty listener, but it’s something I should work on. My eyes are always darting around, and I’m actively degrading the quality of our conversation because of it.

For me, my main problem is getting lost in my own thoughts, more so than picking up my phone or falling into other peoples' conversations. Or assuming that I know how a conversation will go. I loved the descriptions and suggestions that You’re Not Listening contained that can ideally derail those habits. (On that note, author Kate Murphy could also be a little holier-than-thou at times, but it never felt too condescending. Take it with a grain of salt.)

I underlined a ton. The examples were compelling, the language was smooth, and the statistics were fascinating. I loved the quotes peppered in from other narratives that fleshed out the overall message of the read. It’s focused, but not preachy, and that is my sweet spot for instructive or psychological nonfiction. The lines felt true in a way that was accessible — perhaps corny, for some readers — but that resonated with me at this point in my life, especially when considering the limited opportunities to connect and listen deeply before leaving this campus.

“To listen well is to figure out what’s on someone’s mind and to demonstrate that you care enough to want to know. It’s what we all crave: to be understood as a person with thoughts, emotions, and intentions that are unique and valuable and deserving of attention…what makes us feel most lonely and isolated in life is less often the result of a devastating traumatic event than the accumulation of occasions when nothing happened but something profitably could have.”

2024 Update: Ouch. This one hits right now.

One aspect of getting to know people I’ve always thought about is how there’s this small window in which someone is a stranger to you, someone you can have a fresh conversation with. There’s something inarticulably meaningful about the truths that bubble up to the surface when you exist purely, without context, in the space of a small conversation.

After a certain point, your conversations are muddled by what you know and the versions of them are familiar to you, consciously or not. The book emphasizes this point: you’re more likely to listen well to a complete stranger than someone you think you know. You’re biased to think that you understand them, when you don’t. That’s actually one of the struggles I’ve dealt with the most at a small school: the feeling like I couldn’t talk to people because you know people on a surface level too well to get to know them. Patience, baby.

One example I found fascinating was that the reason group sessions for couples works is that how much you tell, and what you tell, is explicitly dependent on whether you think the other person is listening — so although they might not think their significant other is listening, they know that others are, which allows them to articulate the problem much more clearly. It’s not a conscious thing, but a reflex in the way that you phrase your stories and emotions. Or I’d never realized that your inner voice is literally dependent on how you talk to other people, and that you can physically and tangibly change it. Your head perceives it as louder than other auditory inputs.

“So it doesn’t matter how long you have known or how well you think you know people; if you stop listening, you will eventually lose your grasp of who they are and how to relate to them. Relying on the past to understand someone in the present is doomed to failure”

You’re Not Listening framed the solutions simply. It’s not so much the time you set aside, or the body language, or any of that. It’s the quality of the conversation, and shifting the way that you engage in it. Instead of considering partway through someone’s sentence what to say next (which activates different parts of your brain and derails that lovely, brain-waves-synching phenomenon which is that connected, satisfactory feeling after a good conversation), a better strategy is to deeply considering why they’re telling you that story. It’s not so much what they’re saying so much as the deeper undertones of why they’re saying it. (As a writer, I also thought a lot about showing vs. telling — although someone is telling you something, the language they’re using is showing you what’s important to them at that moment.) Also, language is generally so unstable, especially if you consider personal contexts and nonnative languages. There’s so much to think about! I loved the thought spirals that this book put me in.

In conversations, we crave finality. We detest long silences. We assume the coherence of a narrative we create, rather than allowing for doubts to exist comfortably, because we assume that every exchange is somehow projecting a layer onto our identities rather than allowing people to be contradictory and unsure of their phrasing.

“People are always telling you who they are.”

It’s a phenomenal book for understanding friendships, more so than one that explicitly talks about relationships. The way it talked about who you genuinely feel connected to versus who you might spend your time with — what to do when those overlap and what to do when they don’t — was engrossing and relatable at this point in my coming-of-age years. (It also helped me to understand why I still consider two of my best friends my “best friends” although we’re not geographically close, or don’t even get to talk to each other that often.) Because of that, and the book’s insistence on feeling most connected with the people you’ve drifted from and come back to, it’s oddly hopeful.

It talks about the ratio of good interactions to bad interactions that have to occur for you to continue talking to someone. How we unconsciously try to dilute the intensity of our conversations based on physiological factors of the actual act of listening. How we soften.

2024 Update: I've thought about this ratio fun fact a lot over the years, and sometimes worry about it because I know I can be an intense person. I want to be open enough to others that I get the chance to dilute that initial impression.

Also, I loved that it talked about Arthur Aron’s 36 questions for getting to know someone. The Modern Love column is one of my favorites.

To enjoy this book, you also have to be able to acknowledge a lot of your flaws in the way you listen to others. If you do, it’s valuable. It paints a picture of listening as a form of generosity. Thinking about listening would ideally make you more empathetic, more aware of how you speak to other people. It’s an optimistic read too. Peoples’ conversational styles have evolved, but being a bad listener or hogging the conversation isn’t an automatic indicator of someone being selfish or bad.

It’s about being more comfortable with silence. The pleasure of someone circling back around to a conversation long after to follow up on a point. It feels good, because it shows that someone’s thinking about what you said, but it doesn’t happen nearly as often as we should considering that those conversations are where our minds go anyways. I loved the overview of all the tendencies that we have in the course of a conversation, why they’re important, how they vary between people you know and people you don’t, all that jazz.

I loved You’re Not Listening. I found it to be well balanced, and helpful. It was an enjoyable read — some really blow-your-mind facts in there that endlessly spark my curiosity — saturated with importance on both a personal and cultural level. Definitely the one I’ll be recommending to everyone I know (maybe after a good long conversation.)

Lines I Loved

• To really listen is to be moved physically, chemically, emotionally, and intellectually by another person’s narrative.
• Someone who has been listened to is far more likely to listen to you.
• Instead of thinking, "this person is a jerk and out for themselves," I think, "Oh, man, this person is really struggling to be seen."
• People are always coming up with alternative and sometimes cryptic ways of saying what they don’t want to come out and say.
• For all the times we have that moment of “Oooh! Now I get it,” There are many more misunderstandings we fail to catch. We are oblivious to all the hurt feelings, missed opportunities, and botched jobs. All because we couldn’t be bothered to make sure we understood.
• Social regrets…tend to be more intense than nonsocial regrets. Moreover, research shows that you regret most the things you could have done differently but can’t do differently. Not listening is ripe for regret because once you let the opportunity slip away, you can never re-create the moment and often don’t realize what you missed until it’s too late…Regret is the second-most common emotional state, after love, she said, and the two feelings are intertwined since the most intense regret comes from neglecting those we love.
• People tend to regret not listening more than listening.
• Not listening because you don’t agree with someone, you are self-absorbed, or you think you already know what someone will say will make you a bad listener. But not listening because you don’t have the intellectual or emotional energy to listen at the moment makes you human.
• When you reflect on what someone said, the person’s thoughts and feelings take up residence in you. It’s an extension of the idea of listening as a form of hospitality.
• It’s flattering when someone listens to you, which is why we' are drawn to those increasingly rare individuals who actually do. Listening is a courtesy, and more fundamentally, a sign of respect. It’s impossible to convince someone you respect them by telling them so. It must be demonstrated, and listening is the simplest way to do that.