Why is communication so hard?

date

Jan 21, 2026

slug

communication-hard

status

Published

who am i writing this to

to all the builders in the world.

Personal story why i am interested in it

As a main contributor at mesh. I get to explain what we do most of the time. When somebody ask a question and we have not heard it before, it usually get to me to either make decision or rephrase the question so we can decide on the best answer we can make at the moment. In the first couple of times I was super frustrated why it seems like that people don’t understand what I’m saying. I categorized every person into two: one who cannot understand because they are not smart enough, and one who don’t pay enough attention. I lived with this model for a long time, till I got so many blockers because I cannot explain myself or the organization that I started questioning this model. This essay is about what I have found out.

Communcation, time and space comms

From encryption theory 101, there are two types of commuication. One is in space, and one is in time. When Alice messages Bob through e.g. WhatsApp the data is traveling through space. When Alice writes a note and saves it, she send it to herself in time. These are essentially equal and the problems of communication (noise, encryption, decryption) are essentially the same.

Difference between understanding and knowledge

The definition I use may differ from other definitions.

Understanding is something which you cannot write down, put into art, communicate in any way.

Knowledge is a something you can write down, put into art, communicate.

The problem of communication

People use communication as a tool to collaborate. Based on the above two definitions, when we communicate we use our knowledge and transform them into data packets (audio, text, symbols) which we send through the channel, and the other person can process it.

I think of as understanding as a high N-dimensional continue space, and whenever someone says something this needs to be converted into discreet packets of data (e.g. words) and than that can be communicated, while knowledge is bounded in the dimensions based on the tool being used (talking → words, draw → symbols, dance → possible movements). This capacity on the knowledge create a non-perfect transform every time, as words such as love, friend, peace, family, home, information, utility art connected to Alice and has her own understanding of it. What I experience is that when these words are put to tests through asking someone what do they mean by that, different answers come up every time. Thus the natural of feeling that someone wants to be understood by someone else is structurally impossible through communication.

Vocabulary, words

The importance of words someone use gets a spotlight in the analysis. If two people who want to communicate use different words and have different understanding behind them, then they are talking about completely different things. Alice can improve this with asking what Bob means by different words, and then use them while communicating with Bob, thus Alice can tell her understanding to Bob with more efficiently.

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