I say the words "human connection" a lot. It's close to the center of everything I do. And more often than I expected, I watch the same thing happen across someone's face. Not disagreement. Not curiosity. A blank stare. I've learned to follow it up, ask what they're thinking, give them room to react. Most of the time, the stare wasn't hiding a thought. It was better described as the absence of any thought.
For a while I read that as disinterest. I don't anymore.
A Word Can Get Quietly Narrowed
Here's what I think is actually happening. "Connection" used to mean something wide: an ongoing, physical, biological fact of belonging to something larger, the way your body belongs to the earth's gravity whether you're thinking about it or not. Nothing sudden about it. Nothing you'd need to go looking for. It was simply the condition you were born into.
Somewhere along the way, the word got a smaller job. Ask most people what "connection" means today and you'll hear about chemistry. A spark. That feeling with someone new that arrives out of nowhere and can vanish just as fast. Real, worth naming, but a fraction of what the word used to carry.
So when I say "human connection" and mean the older, wider thing, I'm not landing on disagreement. I'm landing on a word that's already full. There's no empty space in their head for what I actually mean, because something smaller moved in and took the room a long time ago.
That's a different problem than being wrong about something. It's not being heard as saying anything at all.
Why the Blank Stare Makes Sense
If you offered someone a word in a language they don't speak, you wouldn't expect an argument back. You'd expect exactly what I keep getting. A pause. A polite wait for you to say something they can actually use.
I don't think this is a failure of listening on anyone's part. It's what happens when a word survives but its full meaning doesn't. The sound stays the same. The size quietly shrinks, a little at a time, across enough years and enough conversations that nobody had to agree to it happening at all.
What I'm Trying Now
Lately, instead of saying "human connection" and waiting to see what lands, I try describing it first and naming it after. The feeling of not being alone in a room even in silence. The way a stranger's steadiness can settle your own nervous system without either of you saying a word. People recognize that. They just don't always have it filed under "connection" anymore.
What if the blank stare you get isn't someone failing to understand you, but the sound of a word being asked to hold more than anyone gave it room for in a long time?
This idea runs through Chapter 11 of The Lens That Changes Everything, and it's the ground Songs in the Key of Return keeps returning to. If it's the kind of thing that stays with you, Being Jonas Wilder brings it into the room, live.