Without preconceptions — without having already half-templated and half-mapped the world we are trying to perceive and navigate — we would have to evaluate afresh every smallest object our attention falls upon.

Most facts in consciousness seem to be partly made. A report is the joint product of the knower and known, in which the role of the observer is always selective and usually creative. The facts we see depend on where we are placed, and the habits of our eyes.

For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.

They did what worked in the past, or what they had decided would work — and failed to grasp that the circumstances had shifted so that a previously successful strategy was no longer so. People failed to see what the world was telling them when that message wasn’t one they wanted to hear. They liked being the rulers of their environment. When the environment knew more than they did — well, that was no good at all. Here was the cruel truth: we humans too often think ourselves in firm control when we are really playing by the rules of chance.

David Foster Wallace once said that:The language of images. . . maybe not threatens, but completely changes actual lived life. When you consider that my grandparents, by the time they got married and kissed, I think they had probably seen maybe a hundred kisses. They'd seen people kiss a hundred times. My parents, who grew up with mainstream Hollywood cinema, had seen thousands of kisses by the time they ever kissed. Before I kissed anyone I had seen tens of thousands of kisses. I know that the first time I kissed much of my thought was, “Am I doing it right? Am I doing it according to how I've seen it?”

A lot of the 80s and 90s critiques of postmodernity did have a point—our experience really is colored by media. Having seen a hundred movies about nuclear apocalypse, the entire time we’ll be looking over our shoulder for the camera, thinking: “Am I doing it right?”

Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations. When giver meets giver or taker meets taker, all is well. When giver meets taker, however, giver gives, taker takes, and giver gets resentful (“Why won’t he ask me a single question?”) while taker has a lovely time (“She must really think I’m interesting!”) or gets annoyed (“My job is so boring, why does she keep asking me about it?”).

Conversational affordances often require saying something at least a little bit intimate about yourself, so even the faintest fear of rejection on either side can prevent conversations from taking off. That’s why when psychologists want to jump-start friendship in the lab, they have participants answer a series of questions that require steadily escalating amounts of self-disclosure (you may have seen this as “The 36 Questions that Lead to Love”).

There is no known cure for egocentrism; the condition appears to be congenital. The best we can do is offer our interlocutors all sorts of doorknobs––ornate French door handles, commercial-grade push bars, ADA-compliant auto-open buttons––and listen closely for any that they might give us in return. The best improvisers, like the best conversation partners, have very sharp hearing; they can echolocate a door slightly left ajar, waiting for a gentle push from the outside.

So the next time you find yourself slogging through a conversation that just ain’t working, remember this little ditty:GIVE-AND-TAKE, TAKE-AND-TAKEIT’S ABOUT THE AFFORDANCES THAT YOU MAKEDO NOT BEA SOCIAL SLOBUSE CONVERSATIONAL DOORKNOBS