“There is no such thing as conversation,” the novelist and literary critic Rebecca West famously wrote in her collection of stories, The Harsh Voice. “It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.” In her opinion, our own words simply pass over the words of others without any profound communication taking place. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20211109-what-we-get-wrong-about-conversations