deep conversations?

photo by Mathias Reding

everyone’s hopping from one thing to the next
no one can sit still for too long
pressures of life, commitments abound
there’s never any time
for good conversations
too high to go deep
too distracted to care
too proud to look hurt
too gone to be there
I think I vaguely remember
a time when phone calls were heaven
now it’s confusion, panic, and we instantly reject it
video calls remind us too much of work
and texts are like, what’s up, and how’s life
and did you do anything fun over the weekend?
we watch so much shit, but never at the same time
and there’s no shared space for thoughtful discussion
we talk at each other, not with each other
we don’t listen, we just anticipate our next turn…
I don’t know, please tell me
where did all the deep conversations go?
everything is too much, or you don’t wanna know,
let’s not go down that road,
everyone’s avoiding the trauma dumps
but the truth is, we’re too broken and lost
to even begin to show that we care
you can’t troubleshoot someone else
if you haven’t reflected inward on yourself…
and that’s the problem — we all live outside ourselves now — 
on the internet, and at work — where we’re forced to be fake — 
in our phones, endlessly scrolling, comparing
 — a deluge of empty sharing, always striving to be something
we’re not, for people whose souls we’ve somehow forgotten…
someday we’ll be asking ourselves, hey, what does it mean,
this word, con-ver-say-shun?
I vaguely remember hearing it somewhere,
it’s on the tip of my tongue

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Garbage Notes:

I’m not sure this needs much elaboration. I think the message is clear. In a society where people are more distracted and self-absorbed than ever, it becomes hard to really sit down and connect on a deep level.

There’s several lines that I can point to as being particularly salient, but reading it now, what stands out the most is the idea that a lot of conversations I’ve either witnessed or been a part of lately, particularly in public or in casual settings, feel like each person is just waiting for their turn to say something.

They’re not actually listening or shaping their next utterance based on the dynamic unfolding rhythm of the interaction. It’s like, oh, I have something urgent to say and you have something urgent to say, and we’re both just sort of waiting for the other person to finish.

This quickly becomes obnoxious and unsatisfying, and often I find myself walking away from conversations without even giving a decent reason as to why I don’t have enough patience to tolerate what is clearly more of a kindergarten show and tell, than an actual adult dialogue.

Maybe this is the effect of modern internet-driven forces on communication styles. We’re growing more accustomed to spewing out some kind of content and then waiting for people to either like or dislike or imitate or reiterate or one-up what’s already been said.

It just seems to me that people used to be more attentive and present and aware of their own behaviors. Seems like people—oh, I don’t know, maybe before the advent of social media—were more sensitive to the reactions of their conversation partners, and cared about reciprocally improving the entire experience of a conversation.

Things felt more vulnerable and real and intimate when you knew the other person was there with you for the sole purpose of listening and thoughtfully engaging, rather than looking to fill the air with their own opinions as quickly and efficiently and as emphatically as possible.

This is not to say I haven’t been able to have some amazing conversations with certain people that I admire and look up to and cherish in my life in recent memory. It just feels like overall, conversational dynamics as a whole, have either become more superficial or degraded as technology has made things faster and easier. Immediate gratification has become prioritized over deep listening and long term interpersonal satisfaction.

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Franco Amati 2026

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