In a world full of smartphones trying to find your favorite song or trying to find the next show to binge. We still have a hard time, understanding the concept of listening. We live in the most advanced society in human history. It is the name of Drake and Future 2015 collaborative mixtape What A Time To Be Alive. If you really think about it, the year is 2019, 7.5 billion people live in this place we call Earth. An estimated 330 million live in the U.S. and yet our biggest problem is not poverty, mass incarceration, or even wanting HBO to add another season to Game of Thrones. Our biggest issue is the art of listening. The concept is very simple but yet difficult to humans especially Americans.

I had a class this past semester that is built on discussion, the professor encourages students to participate in discussions especially if students have different opinions on topics which we do. I would say my professor is very good with not putting his bias in topics and letting students debate, discuss, or talk about their differences and views of the world. However, one thing he does not do is moderate students to listen to one another. To get a person to "shut up" and open their mind to really listen is somehow difficult for us. For instance, there was a discussion in class over gun control. This is a topic that both sides of the political spectrum get heated up for when in reality some individuals of the right and left share the same beliefs. The gun control discussion in class consisted of two students. Let's call them, Emma and Matthew, two great generic American names. Matthew is a republican maybe independent that leans towards the right and he is a huge supporter of the NRA, which is nothing wrong with that. Emma is a democrat and very supportive of the ideals that the "Left" put out, which is nothing wrong with that, either. To be honest, their discussion did not get heated or crazy as one may think. Matthew was giving his opinion on gun control and was giving great talking points on his stance. Emma did not even refute what Matthew was saying surprisingly, she actually agreed with him. Do you want to know where the fault happens, when Matthew did not know what to do when Emma agreed with him, as crazy as that sounds? When Matthew got finished, he completed his points by saying that the gun laws we have in place are good and fine. The only thing Emma responded with is that they should be enforced a little more. She did not respond with, they should change it, make laws stricter, or even get rid of it. Emma responded to Matthew's point by agreeing with him, but just adding her two little cents with they should enforce them a little harder. When Matthew heard that, he went out his way to keep coming at Emma but the funny thing was she kept agreeing with, all she said was they (as in the government) should just do a better job of enforcing them. After that little back n forth Matthew started to stumble over his words and couldn't get his points anymore. When Emma decided to state why she agreed with Matthew he kept interrupting her, to still and try to get his point across which didn't make any sense because essentially by this point he just kept repeating his points from the start of the discussion. We ask every day for people to do their best to try and see common ground with each other. Well in the class example that I gave Emma saw common ground with Matthew, she just had a small addition to his point. That he fully couldn't understand and when she tried to explain it, he just kept interrupting her. In my mind, the only thing he had to do was listen because when Emma gave her opinion on gun control, she was again in agreement with Matthew. The two biggest internal issues that we Americans face is listening and understanding what is being said.

An article posted on the University of Washington, Communication page gives a definition of debate. The article states, "Debate is the activity that brings the art of reading, thinking and speaking together in one place." An article on this website called study Buddhism gives its take on the purpose of debate and listening in a debate. The article states, "debating provides a situation more conducive than meditation for beginners to develop concentration. The challenge of your partner in the debate and the influence of having classmates listening force you to concentrate. When meditating alone, only willpower brings you to stop mentally wandering or falling asleep. In addition, on the monastic debate grounds, many debates take place very loudly next to each other. This also forces you to concentrate. If the debates around you distract you or cause you to be annoyed, you are lost. Once you develop concentration skills on the debate ground, you can apply them to meditation, even to meditating in noisy places." Over and over, time after time, people love the action of getting in a verbal warfare with each other but the peace of listening to one another is the next step that some have not reached. People are scared to have their views changed, altered, or modified. From college students to leaders of the country, the art of listening is a challenge that an individual needs time to learn. Since I'm a college student, I will give my take on the problem with young people and listening before I make my way to older generations. When you come to college as an eighteen-year-old, you enter into a different world of culture. A place where one can go to get enlightened or established. College is a world built on learning, from parties to reality, an individual learns another aspect of the world that was not taught to them before. A person in this world seeks out teachers, advisors, or instructors in any walks of life to be influenced by. A college student doesn't have any experience in life and what is living. So, they seek out guidance to find a way of living. Fennel Hudson states, "The young man only looks to the future because he has lived little; the old man looks to the past because he has little left to live." Young people are looking towards a future that they do not know of and so to get a better grasp of what lies ahead they come to places like college and meet people that can be instructors for them in life. So, young people ideas are not built from the ground up, they are built from the last person they talk too. A person's character, morals, ideals, or even identity can be traced back to the people they hang around with or seek guidance from.

I was watching a Ben Shapiro video one time where he was speaking at a college campus and in the video, he was doing a Q & A. In this portion of the video, I heard something that summed up why young people have a hard time listening to one another. In the video, a student asked Ben Shapiro, how would Ben respond to this topic of debate if the opposing side makes a point. Now if you read that previous sentence slowly, you can see the issue. A student asks Ben Shapiro what to do if someone debates him on his views on a certain issue. So that means the student does not want to engage in debating an issue, he just wants to be right on an issue. He does not want to listen and comprehend what the opposing side is saying in an argument. The student just wants to get his/her point across and ignore the other side argument. Why? Because if the student is wrong in that argument, that means his views has to change if his views have to change that means his identity has to change. If his identity has to change that means the person, he admires like Ben Shapiro is wrong and that person is too afraid to admit that his views are wrong or a person like Ben Shapiro could be wrong as well. Now, this is not an attack on Ben Shapiro, for I am a huge fan of Shapiro as well. The point I'm making is that when a college student enters into a debate, their views are merely the person that they admire and if they are wrong then that means the person that they admire are wrong are as well. A young adult does not want to be told that the person they look up to is wrong or ignorant. Some if not most young adults truly believe that the person they admire is right all the time and so when they get into a debate with their peers, they are not there to listen but to retort what their influencers had said. I have seen some of my peers go on YouTube and type in "how to respond (to an argument)." This is crazy because as a college student you are supposed to be in a world full of learning but yet it seems like once you found the people you admire and listen to then everyone else is wrong. The issue here is that no one is willing to listen, Epictetus states, "We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak." The whole point of debating or discussion is to engage and listen for the goal of finding a common ideal. However, if one is trying to just attack one's sides or be a talking mouthpiece for their admirer then are they really debating. No. We as Americans, really as humans have to fix the issue of listening and understanding what is being said. Everything is not a competition; you should not have the mentality of trying to win a discussion or a debate. Now you may say well, that is the whole purpose of debating, that's why there are competitions on debating. That's why we have a presidential debate before voting day to see who we are going to choose and in my opinion that is the problem.

Now I love a good debate over sports, music, movies, etc. However, when we start talking about politics, morality, or social issues debate should the last form of engagement you should have with one another. We need to engage in a discussion. That is why it should not be a presidential debate there should a presidential discussion. I feel like that's where we went wrong in the beginning of society which is establishing discussion over the debate. Creating an atmosphere where an individual has to win a conversation and not listen in a conversation. If you are not in debating competition where the goal is to win then you need to realign your mind with the environment, you in and the topic that is being presented to you and listen to what is being said. Young people should always be listening, our minds should constantly change, progress, or get better. We have not experienced the world enough to have a set of beliefs yet when it comes to issues. It's okay to have a set of foundational beliefs and moral but even those you have to understand why you even have those foundations. A young person should always seek to learn and never stop learning because you'll end up like most older people in life. A person that is so strictly set on their own beliefs they refused to believe that they are wrong, no matter what you tell them. The same scenarios I see played out in college with young people conforming their ideas to the person they admire, the same goes for older people which is worse. I have met and seen older individuals who feel like they do need to listen to anyone no more especially a younger person which is vice versa. I have met and seen older individuals who swear that they know it all. I have seen older individuals fight with one another over little issues that they can sit down and discuss, and these types of fights are worse than young college students debating. I sometimes think that we should push back the age of voting to 25 or maybe 30 because it takes a long time for people to develop a mind of their own and sometimes it can take longer pass the age of 30. In the most advanced civilization that we live in today, the idea of listening, comprehending, and then understanding what is being told to you is a difficult thing to do especially in a discussion. That's why most discussions turn to debates because people are not ready to have their minds changed. What's more annoying with older adults is the longer they go believing their views, the harder it will be for them to listen to anyone but themselves and the person that they admire as well.

The definition of debate has been changed practically to trying to win a verbal battle when in reality debate in its simplest form is a discussion between two opposing parties with the ultimate goal being a resolution between the two. Is it really that hard for individuals in society to sit down and listen to one another? This is an issue that needs to be fixed now because if we can't find common ground on different issues, how would be able to get rid of problems that are killing us? Finding common ground with one another is key to a healthy society and the way to do that is listen to each other. We do not want to keep putting the same problems on every generation because that same problem can only get worse without talking and listening to each other. Let's fix the communication in society, better yet the world by having actual discussions and less verbal sparring matches with each other.