Mikey’s Funnies had this joke yesterday:

A guy had to ask his neighbor for help getting his new sofa inside the apartment because it got stuck in the door.

After about twenty minutes of vigorous pushing and maneuvering, the guy pants, “I think we’ll have to call it a day. There’s no way we’re getting it inside.”

The neighbor looks at him slowly, “Wait, INSIDE?”

Do we have a shared understanding of what we’re trying to do? These guys (the picture was created by GROK AI) share the concept “sofa” and “move sofa.” They do not share a concept about which direction they should be moving it. In this case there is a simple solution: the man who owns the sofa should engage in clear communication and say something like, “Please help me get my sofa INSIDE my apartment.”

Most of our current lack of shared understanding is not so simple. We don’t have shared understanding whether the sofa should be in or out. We don’t have shared understanding about who should do the work of moving the sofa. We don’t even have shared understanding about whether it is a sofa or if it is, whose it is.

Even worse, it seems that we don’t even think having a shared understanding is a good thing (unless maybe the shared understanding is entirely of our own choosing).