Also, in the theme of Somali communication styles that confuse me (this one pisses me off, slightly) It takes forever and a day for someone to get to the point. They really enjoy going through each part of the story, which is great, the whole expressing yourself through storytelling, but ...time and place. I lack both the attention span and patience for it.
The difference in time management is culturally instructive. Instead of viewing it as a flaw, rather see it as a consequence of our historic relational realities.
In the post-industrial Western world, the disposability of time is constrained, which loses socio-cultural nuance. What replaced human connection is institutions and structural processes that manage and compartmentalize a person overtly in a systemic fashion, mediating information through such tractable processes, rather than a social tradition that regulated a person through the eyes of other people's wisdom, learned experience, and news that could only be mediated through hours of communication and patience. With this, you could get updates on world affairs from the other side of the world through a network of people, and receive upgrades on life strategies. That has been replaced by the news and formal education. You see? We've outsourced what was in human connection through specialized production areas. We live in an efficiency-based economic system that rewires and breaks down aspects of relational networks of humans. When you hear the elders speaking, taking their time like ents, know it is a good thing, walaal.
This is extremely important for relational communal regularity. It's one of the cornerstones of why Islam spread fast and was maintained. Why the economic reality in the Somali peninsula was very advanced and flexible from antiquity to the pre-modern Age. Deep caravan systems worked because there were trust-based macro-networks that were built on social trust. A socio-cultural ethos born out of the social codes and constant interactions. This led to the potential of high economic scalability. Things might seem slow in the conversation, but value is not lost.
The more individualistic, task-based people get, the more we are susceptible to becoming atomized. A lot of people are objectively more systematically connected in a globalized fashion in the West but yet feel isolated.
There is a trade-off with having a fast-paced society. When I was in the homeland, it felt like time itself was going much slower, and I could soak up the day more somehow.
