Eavesdropping-Peeling the layers of Misconceptions.
Take a pick, ignorance or knowledge.
Our primitive cave uncles and aunts were quite the same as they are today. Their agenda was to keep their niblings morally upright. So, they told us- “No staring. No Eavesdropping”. We took this to heart and stuck to the philosophy for millennia.
No Staring! No Eavesdropping.
But some curious souls have lesser willpower count and fail to resist. The urge, so strong, to listen to conversations that aren’t meant for you. Moreover, sometimes you can be the focal point in some conversations. Listening to your name being tossed around like a ragged doll might boil your blood, and at one point, you might regret your curiosity, but the pick is yours- ignorance or bliss?
Well, sometimes bliss can be disguised as revelations, too. But eavesdropping is the only force that lets you ‘The Revelation.’
For writers, it’s Strawberry on cheesecake. How? Judy Blume says that listening to random conversations gives you an idea of how people in the normal world talk to each other. And helps you write a dialogue that advances your story. However, the dialogue should be realistic and not an error-free full sentence. Circling back, the source of the rare mining is eavesdropping.
Albeit it makes a human better. If you are a normal-functioning human taking transits, wading through crowds, chances are steep-high that you’ve eavesdropped. Now, if you deny it, you are lying, you Sleuth. We are genetically programmed to do so; that was why our primate uncles and aunts stigmatized the honest-to-goodness human act of listening. Everything that came as a natural curiosity was denied outright to create an environment of moral uprightness.
There are misconceptions about this well-disposed ideology that we are carrying as generational trauma.
Misconception 1. Breach of trust.
Eavesdropping makes us better people; it makes us a better race. Don’t believe it? Ask Mark Zuckerberg and his cohorts. Digital eavesdropping has upended the world; if not for interception, how would big tech conglomerates mine the raw emotional data to make your digital clone? The tech world has augmented our shared sense of reality that now underpins our society with perfected physical sense. And something as noble as this can’t be labeled a trust breach. Zilch. Zero. No. Eavesdropping isn’t a breach of trust.
Misconception 2. Audible voyeurism.
Ah! the blames. Voyeurism, by definition, means extracting pleasure by secretly watching people in their intimate moments. Right? While eavesdropping isn’t always for pleasure. It might be for self-discovery, too. And we all know the path to self-discovery is a glacier with a layer of thin ice. So, eavesdropping superficially can be the doppelganger of audible voyeurism, but Nada. Nope. Al Zippo. It isn’t Audible Voyeurism.
Misconception 3. Intellectual Theft.
We live in an extremely complex world with shifting social arrangements. It’s more than a wild game where you must chase a deer, hunt it, mate your spouse, and sleep as a log. The days of hunting and foraging are long over, man. The brother is competing with the brother, and the sisters are competing too. It is a dog-eat-dog world. With a new level of competition and vulnerability in professional and personal space, you have to eavesdrop. To stay updated and upskilled. Let’s imagine you eavesdrop on your work bestie coming up with a prototype of a product or service; you won’t be stealing the idea, right? Maybe come up with a quite similar one. Nope, Eavesdropping isn’t intellectual theft.
Paradoxically, eavesdropping enabled us to have intimate experiences and social dominance and that had us ahead of the curve.
What could be more to start un-stigmatizing it?
