Do Humans Understand Each Other?

Since day one on earth, we have been trying to understand each other. A child takes birth, and the process commences. They look around, watch people, observe their behavior and start understanding. It is the ability to understand, that an infant knows that he has to cry in order to get fed. It was that day and it is today. We, humans, are still trying to understand each other.

The moment I decided to write this essay, I put a story on my Instagram asking the same question ‘Do Humans Understand Each Other?’ Some said ‘yes’, some said ‘no’, and some said ‘sometimes, but not always’. ‘Sometimes but not always’ seemed the most accurate to me. No-one can understand us all the times, but everyone can understand us sometimes.

Humans are complicated species, so is this question. You can’t give a general answer for all the humans. Because humans vary, and so will the answer. It may be a NO for parents, but a YES for friends, a NO to boss, but a YES to colleagues or even viceversa. Different people share different levels of understanding, and this level of understanding depends on the relationship we share.

Understanding is a complex subject too. It depends on how you understand ‘understanding’. Because understanding someone isn’t just about listening to what someone says, and acting accordingly. It’s about listening to what is not said. Only if humans understood each other, life would have been far more beautiful and simpler. Only if parents understood their children and children understood their parents there wouldn’t be any broken families. Only if teachers understood their students, and students understood their teachers, there wouldn’t be any failures. Only if nations understood each other, there wouldn’t be any wars. Only if we understood each other, relationships would have been easier, love would’ve been deeper, and hate would’ve been shallower.

But it’s not that no human on earth, understands another human. A mother understands her children, because she loves them, she has lived with them, raised them to whoever they’ve become. Friends understand each other, because they’ve spent a lot of time together and made a lot of memories. Relationships bear understanding and understanding holds relationships together. When bound in a relationship, even animals start understanding our gestures. And when relations lack, even spoken words aren’t understood.

The irony is that, we all want to be understood, but are barely willing to understand. And there are considerable reasons why humans don’t understand each other. We are all complicated, still trying to understand ourselves, struggling to figure out our own lives. We don’t have problems in our lives, we have life in our problems that we’ve been dealing with, since the first day. And yet, we’re all different, living different lives, dealing with different problems. Considering all this, how do you expect someone to even try to understand others, when we aren’t even clear about ourselves? We have been living ourselves for all these years and yet, we aren’t clear about our choices, our aims, and our beliefs. How can we ever understand someone else completely? But still, human nature, we don’t give up and we keep trying.

I’ve always wondered that if I ever find a magical lamp, and a Genie splutters out of it, granting me 3 wishes. One of them is definitely going to be, “letting me live the lives of others” I’ve lived 18 years as a middle class city girl, who’s good at studies and certain co-curricular activities. I would really love to know what it feels like being a boy, or being a rich girl or boy, or a village girl, or a girl who’s not good at studies and barely passes, or even fails etcetera etcetera. All of it just because I want to understand them.

People are really fond of exploring stuff. They love exploring nature, on the land, under the sea, exploring art, exploring technology. The thing that not much people are fond of is exploring humans. It is in fact, one of the most underrated things, but much more fascinating at the same time. Communication is the key to understanding. In order to understand one another, we all need to communicate.We’ve all got complications in our lives. Biggest of them being, ‘Misunderstandings’. We don’t understand each other. And instead of talking to each other about it, we end up making assumptions.

Something makes me feel that we are all similar and compatible to each other. Like, when any one reads the story of Romeo and Juliet, a girl will picturise herself as Juliet and a boy will picturise himself as Romeo. No guy will ever see himself as Tybalt (Juliet’s cousin). We listen to songs, and we all are able to relate. These things make me feel that, at some point, we all are similar and we all can understand each other. But the thing is, we aren’t able to understand, that we can understand each other. Or maybe, we are all pretending that we cannot understand, because once we start understanding each other, it won’t be easy to make decisions. As all the decisions we make for our good, proves bad for someone at some point of time. And if we start understanding everyone, and considering each other’s goods and bads, we won’t be able to make decisions and move on with our lives. Maybe, that is why we don’t want to understand each other. And maybe that is why we choose to live this complicated life. Because we are afraid that, understanding each other may complicate our complications even more.

So putting all the pieces together, Humans are difficult and so is understanding. So “Do humans understand each other?” is a really difficult question altogether. Nor can we say that, “Yes, humans do understand each other.” Neither can we say that, “No, humans don’t understand each other.” But I can definitely say one thing very confidently that, “Yes, we humans do try to understand each other.”