Every time someone says more than one thing, you make a choice. You pick a thread and follow it. The other threads — the ones you didn’t pick — quietly disappear. This happens so fast and so automatically that most of us don’t even register it as a decision. But it is one, and it shapes every conversation we have.

Jesse Danger names the default pattern with disarming honesty:

“The thing I do is latch on to either whatever I’m most curious about, or more often, whatever kind of bothers me the most. If someone has a list of things that are bothering them then I’ll hop right into the one that’s not quite right. And I feel like that can really shut the conversation down.”

There it is — the invisible triage of listening. When someone offers us three threads, we don’t consciously weigh them. We react. We grab whatever lights up our curiosity or triggers our defensiveness, and we run with it. The other threads aren’t rejected — they’re simply never acknowledged. They fall into a gap that neither person names.

What’s striking about Danger’s observation is the phrase “shut the conversation down.” He’s not describing a failure to listen. He is listening. He hears all the threads. But his selection criteria — what bothers him most — transforms the conversation from an exchange into a correction. The other person offered multiple doors. He walked through the one marked “you’re wrong about this,” and the rest silently closed behind him.

Craig Constantine describes a different approach — one that makes the triage itself visible:

“Jesse says ‘a’ and ‘b’ and ‘c’ and throws all these things at me, and then I grab ‘b’ and I start talking about it. I often try to end with, ‘and I think I missed a lot of other things that you threw at me.’ I’ll at least raise a semaphore — I’m aware that I only did one, sorry.”

This is such a small move. A sentence, maybe two. But it changes the entire dynamic, because it makes the selection process transparent. Instead of the other person wondering whether their other points were heard (or worse, assuming they weren’t worth addressing), they get explicit confirmation: I heard you. I chose this one. The others still exist.

Why does this matter so much? Because the unacknowledged threads don’t actually disappear for the person who raised them. They linger. They accumulate. They become the growing sense that this person doesn’t really hear me, or that what I care about doesn’t register. Over enough conversations, the dropped threads weave themselves into a story about the relationship: they only engage with what interests them. They never follow up on the things that matter to me.

The signposting practice — naming what you’re not addressing — works precisely because it interrupts this accumulation. It says: your other points exist in my awareness even though I can’t follow all of them right now. That acknowledgment, paradoxically, can make someone feel more heard than actually addressing every point would. Because what people often need isn’t comprehensive coverage. They need evidence that you’re receiving the whole signal, even if you can only respond to part of it.

There’s a deeper pattern here about what drives our thread selection. Danger identifies two attractors: curiosity and irritation. Both are self-centered criteria. What am I most interested in? What bothers me? Neither asks the question that might matter most: what does the other person most need me to engage with?

This isn’t a moral failing. It’s the default architecture of attention. Our brains are wired to detect salience — things that matter to us — and they’re extraordinarily good at it. Constantine describes this detection system as something “wired deeply,” comparing it to the primal ability to spot snakes. We can’t help noticing what’s salient to us. The question is whether we treat that automatic response as the final word on what to engage with.

What would it look like to choose threads based on what the other person needs heard? It would require a kind of listening that goes beyond content — listening for emphasis, for emotion, for the thing that seems to carry the most weight even if it was said most quietly. The thread someone mentions last, almost as an afterthought, is sometimes the one they most need you to notice.

None of this means you should try to address everything. That’s its own kind of failure — the scattered response that touches all points and engages with none. The insight isn’t that you should stop triaging. It’s that you should notice you’re doing it, and occasionally let the other person see your process. Here’s what I’m picking up. Here’s where I want to go. And here’s what I know I’m setting aside for now.

The triage is inevitable. Making it visible is a choice.

This field note references the Open + Curious episode “Hearing multiple things,” published June 7, 2024.