You’re always playing catchup when in a conversation with others; they’re racing ahead on the topic, already knowing both sides of the discussion and throwing their own spin on it, and you’re just sitting there staring at them mouth-agape as you try to process what is being said in realtime, but can’t quite grasp even the base concepts nor the terminology of what they’re talking about because their shop talk is so far removed from the baseline that it’s practically a whole subject in itself.
The smart thing to do is to just interject quickly with simple questions to highlight your supposed ignorance, and get some quick definitions to keep you at least somewhat up-to-date in the conversation.
But you don’t… either too ashamed of your own ignorance to draw attention to it, or rejecting it outright instead of facing the humiliation and telling yourself that you’re not that interested in the topic anyway.
That’s how it feels to me, anyhow
For what it’s worth, I’m very familiar with that feeling too, despite excelling academically and a high score on IQ tests. Ignorance is not a lack of intelligence, it’s more likely a lack of experience. And every culture, job and hobby will have their own terminology and assumed knowledge, so not even the Einsteins could pretend to already know it all.
I listen to music all the time, I’ve composed amateur music myself, and enjoy occasionally reading wikipedia for trivia of music theory, but if two musicians start talking about basic stuff like major and minor chords I’m already out of my depth. Do I do the smart thing and ask them to explain? Or do I just nod until they talk about something I know, or tell myself I don’t actually care about music theory?
I also apparently have high IQ according to online tests and my mind still glazes over conversations even when it’s a topic that I’m supposedly an expert on. I know all the words. If you were then down and I read them, I’ll be able to make perfect sense of them. But a real time conversation? Forget it.
