Why GenZ Can't Speak or Think Clearly

Script

Hello, my friends!

For the longest time, I had a difficulty in sharing my thoughts with people, achieving clarity with my thoughts.

I never felt as if my words that I spoke with my mouth accurately represented what was in my head.

Over the last few months, I've had several epiphany moments where I've been able to resolve this gray area in my mind. And I want to walk through some of these today and explain why I think it is that Generation Z and Millennials cannot seem to think and speak clearly.

I know I'm not the only person that deals with this or has dealt with this. Because I have been able to arrive at a clarity of thought that is satisfactory to me.

It's been able to improve the way I communicate, improve the way I think. And in order to get to that state that I am at currently, I've had to make some serious adjustments in the way I consume information, the way I process it, and the way that I output.

I'll share these as we progress through this conversation. The first thing that I want to address is that articulation your ability to communicate is not the same as competence.

What do I mean by that?

I mean your ability to speak and put thoughts into words does not represent the intellect that you have. I know many talented people who are unbelievably proficient at their domain of expertise or their academic discipline.

And I know they're very very intellectually advanced but they just cannot speak well. They are terrible communicators they can write incredibly well but they cannot draw upon the same depository of knowledge that seems to be expressed in their writing than when they speak. It's the first observation.

I also want to be clear the reason why I think this video will be worth your time and the reason why I think resolving this relationship between thought and language is so essential is because there is an unbelievable amount of opportunity and intelligence associated with those who can put into words what they think.

Those who can access the vast bank of knowledge and the rich consciousness that every single one of us has, bridging that mind and mouth channel or reducing the constriction or the filter, that we often, and I'll explain why we do so, apply to ourselves has for me been the gateway to many opportunities. People begin to take me more seriously I was better able to make sense of the thoughts in my head.

The problem that I think a lot of us face is that we're on autopilot 90% of the time. There's a disconnect that I think we intuitively feel when we communicate our thoughts when we speak. It's almost as if the audible identity of our voice mutes our intellect. It shuts down a part of us that we're able to connect with when we don't speak when we're alone when we're in some sort of pondering or contemplative state.

We're able to tap into a part of our brain that is non-language based. And this is the first distinction that I want to make is where I think buying into this incorrect, fantasy is not the right word but it almost is a fantasy in some sense. We think that our our thoughts are language and when I say language I mean words we think that what we think about a particular topic can be represented in the words that we know.

The fact is that is just not so, it's untrue.

Our thoughts are a compilation of emotions, images, visualizations but also the collective compounding of everything else that we've thought about on that particular topic the way you think about something is not the same way that I would think about something.

And that in some sense is the irony of this discussion in and of itself is the way I am describing things in the way that I visualize them in my mind is not the same way that you're receiving them although we can have, say, I think a majority amount amount of shared understanding and alignment on these topics I do think we can achieve that and that's what gives me a certain amount of confidence in your ability to understand what I'm saying hopefully those touch points are making sense.

But this is the importance of expanding vocabulary and expanding your knowledge of the world is it gives you more tools that you can use to carve and craft the way that you communicate the thoughts in your mind with, even though you cannot perfectly Ever represent what you have in your mind into words you can get very close.

It is almost as if your thought is a picture made up of a hundred colors red blue green purple pink turquoise teal a hundred different colors but if you only know of 10 colors in your little Crayola crayon box that maybe represents your limited vocabulary you are never going to be able to do your thoughts justice and explaining them.

And it's the same thing when you try to digest information from other people if you only have say 10 filters that 10 crayons that you can color with your like the shade of meaning that you can extract from the world is severely limited.

this is why expanding your knowledge is going to be very helpful and you almost are always going to intuitively feel that what people describe and what you say never represents what you think because you're never able to Leverage the output devices which is what a crayon might represent an output device that is able to describe what you intuitively feel.

I hope that makes sense there was kind of a muddled scatter shot of thoughts there. But I do think that's largely behind this lack of clarity is it comes down to vocabulary descriptions language a love of language can do wonders for helping people achieve better Clarity of thought and I've noticed this within my generation is this steady the steady decrease of a baseline vocabulary that has simply become lost and I'm not talking about the study of rhetoric like the ability to be poetic and melodic and proficient with your word choice can help but I also think there's a lot of emotional turmoil that happens in opening up that pursuit of of language that's a conversation that I can speak days on in another video.

I want to be clear as well this discussion is not a critique of social skills I don't think I'm talking specifically about social skills it's a critique with our ability to communicate the average vocabulary has improved meaning the quantity of words that we can recognize our recognition lexicon as it's often referred to has increased we know more words than we knew 50 years ago but the Baseline vocabulary that we have has shrunk significantly we know more words like fortnite blog laptop basketball words that have become more and more buoyant in our language and in what's called our surface lexicon sort of the words that we all have a shared understanding of but our Baseline vocabulary has decreased and I also want to be clear I'm not a purist what some would call a purist in the language sphere where there are people out there who think we should still be speaking in like Shakespeare and that Old English has become lost and tainted in our society and we should return to that age I don't advocate for that I accept that language evolves and that the fabric of our vocabulary requires new threads in order to update the pattern for our modern era but I also do believe that we have lost something that is very very important and that is the way that we communicate I was watching JFK speak and just comparing him to the way our modern politicians speak and I don't mean just those in high offices I mean the standard for what it means to be an intelligence spokeswoman or spokesman has decreased substantially there's no denying that we've lost something very special and what's remarkable about all this is even in the midst of this Mosaic of a lack of clarity like this Mosaic of colors that we have we're not able to put into words what exactly it is that we think there is still a deep reverence that we have for anyone who can command the spoken word I've noticed this in the conversations that I've had with people between say ages 16 to 35. that range there's a deep desire for watching motivational speeches they're some of the most popular videos on YouTube over the last two years in particular we recognize that there's a particular arrangement of words that can have a profound impact on our ability to make sense of the unfocused chaos that is in our minds it's able to crystallize and bring into high resolution ideas that were previously ephemeral and unfocused what I've also noticed as well is that in the times of my life and in the times of the lives of others where these ideas have not been able to be realized those have often been times underwritten with depression and I think depression is too strong of a word I I just think people often confused with depression for lack of clarity and maybe the two are somewhat synonymous with each other I don't know but I also think as well that humans are sealing with complexity and we have such a dynamic range of thoughts and experience when we're unable to materialize those into words we get frustrated and the opposite is true as well when we want someone to understand our thoughts and desires our ability to communicate our emotions let me rephrase that the ability for our emotions and feelings and aspirations and fears to be realized by another person is limited by our ability to communicate them and when we don't have those tools of communication when our cram box is limited to just 10 colors and our emotion is a thousand colors there is this reduction of quality that cannot help but the the result of that is going to be unsatisfaction plain and simple you are going to notice a disconnect and this is part of the reason why we've seen this large rise in Internet figures that don't necessarily have to preach ideas that are upright and righteous but if they can put into words these thoughts that you have always had these these inner feelings of turmoil and and frustration and if they can be the lens that focuses your inner desires they can command those is one of the reasons why Hitler was so powerful as a speaker and while you see the rise of people like Tate or Jordan Peterson they don't have to be necessarily speaking things that are true they just have to cut through the the clutter in this this cloud of chaos into like they just need to have the right words but also the words that makes that are are part of your your recognition vocabulary like the words that you may not be able to employ but that you know and you understand enough that they can be tools that these people can leverage then they can start to sort of color in the lines and bring additional crayons and you realize like wow that's a color that's a color that finally Shades in that D4 Square in my box that was always the color brown or maybe something that's a bit more out of the ordinary something like magenta or cyan that's a color that you you knew existed but the order and its relation to this Mosaic of a thought that you have has finally been able to make sense I want to briefly touch upon what I think are the three causes of this lack of clarity I've been shifting gears all over the place and I apologize if there's no sort of core thought there that you can follow but hopefully we can get on track to be a bit more orderly with our thought here I think the first cause of this lack of clarity is at the standard of language we consume has decreased in other words the Crayola crayon box that we use to represent our thoughts has had a substantial step down and and the way that we organically are hardwired as humans is we want depth we want value this is the reason why we do things like tell stories is a story is a way of making sense of the world around us and we inherently want to make sense of the thoughts that we have what we consume on YouTube or the level of conversation that we have it's very poor it's shoddy it's poorly constructed and what we ingest what we input is it doesn't do justice to the complexity that we have as humans so that's the first observation is the standard of language we consume is decreased secondly we do not input more than we output currently right now or sorry let me I I think the opposite is what I was trying to say is is we don't output more than we input when we should um we we consume information far more than we put our thoughts into speech than we write then we share our thoughts on camera for example and I want to be uh clearer here unless you have a creative job most of us don't spend time consuming information and so it's it's reasonable that there would be this disparity in Delta between input and output I'm not saying that you have to journal for an hour and you then are only afforded time to consume 59 minutes of information but I do think there has been a a decline in the amount of time afforded to outputting our thoughts and putting our mind on to paper or in a text document and I don't necessarily recommend journaling as the solution I think journaling is helpful and I do journal from time to time but any kind of output is how we sort out our input it's like trying to clean out our mind closet we sort of shove a bunch of things in there like we compartmentalize we have different racks for maybe the shoes or the sweaters that we have but every once in a while you have to take everything out and you need to order it and the way that we take everything out of our mind closet is through output that's the second observation is we need to Output more third is I've also noticed this a tendency to adopt opinions wholesale and it's almost this copy and paste of ideas because this is a whole vein of discussion that is outside the focus of this video but this is one of the reasons why I think short form content in particular is devastating not just to our attention spans there's that whole argument but specifically to our ability to step through understanding because there's an idea that we are able to recognize as true say for example someone says oh humans should treat each other with kindness that's not a great example but we'll intuitively say yes that's absolutely true we don't really fully internalize that we intellectually understand that to be an idea that we should strive to adopt but we will never be able to adopt that for a long period of time because we have not arrived at that conclusion on our own we've simply stumbled upon it and said yes that is true and I think this applies more to ideas that are abstract and maybe philosophical in nature and based on our characteristic as humans versus something that is maybe more Technical and Hands-On like for example if someone says oh when you screw on a wrench always go right like we can very quickly find out how that is useful versus something that maybe requires a modification in our Behavior as humans so we sort of have gotten into this hamster wheel of like consuming information and saying yes that's true yes that's true yes that's true but the problem is it's not what we know it's what we do and the information like if you can have the very best lesson in the world or maybe like the the 100 most valuable lessons in the world it doesn't matter if you know those if they're not implemented or internalized in your life it's better that you have the hundred in first best idea but you've arrived at that through your experience than if you had again the hundred best and this is the problem that I think I've we've noticed or I have noticed in a lot of uh not just people my age I sort of use Generation Z because I'm a part of that generation I've been 21 years old but more specifically amongst the Millennials as well is it's anyone I think who's been who's been inundated with this this uh this Mass Information Age that we're in is we have this access like we have this ability to have these lessons but we lack the wisdom like we have the information but we lack the wisdom I think is perhaps the most bare bone way I can communicate this idea is we we recognize something is true we sort of copy it and we paste it to our internal clipboard but that is often I think one of the worst things we can do I think we have to this is perhaps maybe what maturity is that I'm trying to dance around something that is more simple than I'm than the complexity I'm attempting to associate with it but the best lessons are those that we arrive at through experience experience truly is I think one of the best forms of education and if I'm mistaken in that belief that's the conclusion that I've come to but if you have a way that maybe I should perhaps modify that opinion I'm certainly open to discussion I also want to share as I promised in the beginning the three of uh the three things that I have done that have significantly afforded me more clarity of thought and if you're interested I have also created a list of words that I would consider are more crayons in the cram box that have helped me make more sense of the world around me there's a resource down below this video this is something that is a step Beyond just building your vocabulary it they're they're what I would describe to you as those those additional words that give you a new perspective and a new way of seeing the world but I do want to give you three different things that are actionable items that I have fostered over this last year that have made a discernible difference in my ability to to think clearly and as even though I am a work in progress speak more clearly number one is this is going to sound hypocritical because I haven't necessarily followed this principle in this video but it is speaking more slowly it's very easy for our mind to get ahead of our mouth and there's this built-in assumption that we have especially when we're engaged in some sort of social dynamic in a conversation in a conversation with her partner that we have to speak clearly or that we have to speak quickly and Clarity is often compromised with speed we often fear that we will lose our place or lose our turn in the conversation if we don't default to answers quickly and that may happen I think we just have to be comfortable with not always capitalizing on the silence just because we can we should not say more just for the sake of saying more we should seek to speak with intention and calculation I realize that for the longest time I was getting too caught up in how people would perceive me for taking too many pauses and I was allowing that to detract from the thoughts that I wanted to share so the speaking more slowly has helped secondly is record yourself record yourself and listen back to what you say it's one of the reasons why I create these videos it can be videos it could be podcasting it can just be recording yourself with a voice memo on your phone I know that we all have this tendency to shudder when we hear our vocal identity when we hear our own voice but hearing your own thought process allows you to yield a certain amount of objectivity and you can better diagnose the flow of your thoughts and that helps you better able to achieve better Clarity of thought next time you speak the third thing is to Simply read more reading more I think is dramatically undervalued this is I think what it made maybe the biggest shifts that can largely be characterized with that age range that I mentioned 16 to 35 years old is that's the age that's been exposed to information on the computer information that is less uh requiring of your your time and I think there is a depth of humanity that non-fiction and classical literature can open up through the way that they phrase their sentences or the words that they use you learn to express their emotions better and you start to create these neural Pathways in your mind that begin to manifest in your speech you learn that short sentences are great but you learn what a long sentence looks like and you can recognize that and you know how to employ that in conversation and that is something that the internet the way it's set up and the way that information is crafted and distributed now is just not going to teach you and I do think there is a part of how we speak as humans that is being lost and again I'm not trying to preserve this ancient way of speaking or communicating but I do think we're were ah the best way I I hate to sound like a broken record but just coming back to the color analogy like with we are losing colors there are colors that we are not carrying with us and we need those to describe who we are this is what I think a therapist does is I I actually have a friend who's a therapist and he says he spends 80 percent of his time just trying to put into words with the other person has in their mind once you arrive at that shared understanding it's like now you are have you've been able to describe the monster that you can now attack it's like the the weapon part attacking the Beast is easy it's it's been able to identify and describe and discern the beast that's the hardest problem and I think that's something that a lot of people deal with and find particularly challenging I'm sure there's some ideas there that I was missing but I don't want to go on for too long if this is something that you struggle with I am really curious about how many people have the same M it's not even an issue like it's not something I struggle with it's just something that I'm genuinely fascinated by and I've expressed this to a lot of people and like there are dozens of people that have shared this with who have affirmed that this is also something that has been a major issue for them and I'm trying to figure out the solution so if you found something that has been particularly helpful for you leave it below in the comments and other than that thank you for spending your time this this last half hour watching this video.