There is a saying I have come across a few times and recently on substack and it is "people can only understand you at the level of consciousness they are at". I don't think this necessarily means that some people are smarter than others, or that you should consider yourself above someone simply because they don't understand your way of thinking. I think it is more about perspective. We all see the world through the experiences we have had, the things we have learned, the mistakes we have made, and the things we have yet to experience.
Sometimes you can explain something to someone over and over again, change the words, give examples, simplify the argument, and they still don't quite understand what you are trying to say. It can be frustrating because, from your point of view, the connection seems obvious. I like to think of it as standing on different floors of a building. Imagine that you are on the tenth floor and someone else is on the third. You can see things from your window that they simply cannot see from theirs. You might be looking at the entire city, the roads, the buildings and how everything connects together. From the third floor, they might only be able to see the street directly in front of them. If you start describing everything you can see from the tenth floor, they might think you are exaggerating. They might even tell you that what you are describing doesn't exist because they cannot see it themselves. That doesn't necessarily mean either person is wrong. They are simply looking from different positions.
I have noticed that this happens a lot in everyday life. Someone who has never had to manage money may not understand why another person is extremely careful with spending. Someone who has never started a business may not understand why an entrepreneur is willing to spend months working without knowing whether the idea will succeed. Someone who has never experienced failure might interpret caution as fear, while someone who has failed before might see the same caution as wisdom. Experience changes the way we interpret things.
Even relationships work this way. Sometimes you explain why something matters to you, but the other person doesn't understand why you are making such a big deal out of it. Years later, after they experience something similar themselves, they suddenly understand. It can almost become funny. They might come back and say, "I understand what you meant now." and you realise that there was probably nothing wrong with your explanation in the first place. They simply needed to experience something for themselves before the lesson became meaningful.
Life has a strange way of teaching lessons that explanations cannot. You can tell someone what failure feels like, but experiencing it is different. You can explain the importance of saving money, but making a difficult financial decision yourself gives the lesson a completely different weight. You can tell someone that people change, that circumstances change, and that not everything goes according to plan, but sometimes it takes actually living through those changes before the words really sink in.
This is also why I think we should be careful about becoming too frustrated when people don't understand us. We naturally assume that if something is obvious to us, it should be obvious to everyone else. But our version of "obvious" is usually built from years of experiences that another person may not have. What seems like common sense to one person can be a completely unfamiliar way of thinking to another. At the same time, this idea should not become an excuse for refusing to communicate. Saying, "You just aren't conscious enough to understand me," can easily become arrogance disguised as wisdom.
I think there is also something humbling about recognising that we are all standing on different floors at different times. Their are things I understand today that I couldn't have understood five or ten years ago and i wish i did earlier. There are probably things someone younger than me understands better than I do, simply because they have experiences or perspectives that I haven't encountered yet. So the person on the "third floor" today might be the person on the tenth floor tomorrow, while I might discover that there are actually twenty floors above me that I haven't even considered.
