You’ve been very impressive in there. The shower is your courtroom. You are, simultaneously, the judge, the prosecutor, the defense, the witness, and somehow also the quiet crowd in the gallery that nods along appreciatively. The verdict is always the same. You make excellent points.
The person on the other side of the argument — your manager who passed you over for something, the friend who said the thing at dinner three weeks ago, the family member who never quite gets it — is represented today by a version of themselves you’ve built from memory and frustration. They argue badly. They don’t have good answers to your best points. You have a lot of best points.
You step out, towel off, and feel strangely resolved. The actual conversation, of course, will never happen.
You Have a Very Active Inner Court
It’s not just the shower. The commute works well. So does the treadmill. The twelve minutes before you fall asleep is premium real estate for this kind of thing, though it comes with the risk of lying awake for an extra hour because the imaginary person said something you didn’t anticipate and now you need to address it.
We spend an extraordinary amount of mental energy doing this. Not daydreaming, not planning — rehearsing. Running scenarios with absent parties. Delivering speeches nobody asked for. Finding the response that would have been perfect three days ago, and perfecting it now, in private, for nobody.
What’s interesting isn’t just that we do this. It’s how good we are at it. Inside our internal courts, we find exactly the right words in exactly the right order at exactly the right moment. We’re patient and precise and just the right amount of honest. We’re not nervous. We don’t trail off or stumble. We make the point cleanly, the imaginary person understands, and something resolves.
Sometimes — and this is the part worth examining — we even give the imaginary version of the other person better arguments. Not out of fairness, exactly. Because their better arguments require our better responses. We want our best answers ready. We build the opposition stronger so we can come out stronger. Which means we are, in some sense, preparing very seriously for a conversation we have already decided not to have.
We are remarkably eloquent with ourselves and remarkably quiet with the people we’re actually talking to. The gap between those two things is where most of our unfinished business lives.
TOMER ROZENBERG
Why It’s Different When It’s Someone You Love
There are two kinds of imaginary arguments, and they are not the same experience.
There’s the stranger version. The driver who cut you off. The customer service representative who wasn’t rude exactly, but wasn’t quite apologetic enough. The person in the meeting who framed a question as a question when it was clearly a power move in disguise. These arguments are almost recreational. You win them effortlessly, feel momentarily satisfied, and forget about them by lunch. No real stakes. No real person, in any meaningful sense.
And then there’s the other kind — the one with someone who matters. A friend. A partner. A parent. A colleague you genuinely respect. Those arguments are heavier. You return to them. You revise them. You sometimes carry what amounts to a full case file, built quietly over weeks: exhibit A, exhibit B, the pattern you’ve been noticing, the thing they said that one time which seemed small but wasn’t.
What’s strange is that those arguments don’t end the same way. You win, technically, in the sense that you’ve made all your points and nobody has interrupted you. But you don’t feel resolved. You feel like something is still open. Sometimes you see the person the very next day — at work, at dinner, wherever — and they have no idea you’ve been building a case. Everything looks normal. You leave feeling like you won something and lost something at the same time, without being quite sure which was which.
Those arguments aren’t really about winning. They’re about something you haven’t quite been able to name yet.
We Are Not Inarticulate
This is where the obvious interpretation gets it wrong, so let me be precise about something.
The reason we don’t have the real conversation isn’t that we can’t find the words. We have the words. We have found them repeatedly — in the shower, on the treadmill, at 1am, in the car on the way to meet the very person we’re thinking about. We are not struggling with vocabulary. The imaginary conversations are evidence of exactly the opposite: we are quite good at expressing ourselves, when it costs nothing.
The real reason is simpler and harder: in the real conversation, we don’t control what comes next.
In the imaginary version, you give your speech and the outcome is whatever you need it to be. The person understands, finally. Or they’re unreasonable in exactly the ways you already knew, which confirms what you already believed. Either way, the narrative is yours. You wrote every line, including theirs.
In the real conversation, they say something you didn’t write. They respond in a way you weren’t expecting. Or — and this is often the harder version — they genuinely understand, and now something actually has to change. Something between you has to move. And you don’t know yet where it lands.
There’s also a more uncomfortable possibility: sometimes we don’t have the real conversation because we’re not entirely sure we want the outcome to shift yet. The relationship is fine, actually. The situation is manageable. The real conversation might change things, and we’re not certain we want everything that comes with that kind of honesty. The rehearsal lets us feel like we’ve done something without requiring us to do anything.
The imaginary version is a controlled experiment with a predetermined outcome. It costs nothing, risks nothing, and resolves nothing — which is, depending on the day, exactly what you need, and also exactly what makes it insufficient.
The imaginary conversation costs nothing. That’s what makes it feel complete. That’s also what makes it useless.
TOMER ROZENBERG
If this resonates, you might find my book useful — 1% Daily: Choosing Freedom is about the small, quiet ways we either show up for our own lives or keep carefully avoiding them.
What the Imaginary Conversation Is Actually For
I don’t want to be unfair to the shower argument, because it isn’t nothing.
There’s a version of rehearsal that’s genuinely useful. When you don’t yet know what you feel — when something happened that bothered you but you can’t quite identify why — running it internally is how you find out. You notice what you keep returning to. You notice what you skip over. You notice the part of the argument you can’t quite land, which is usually the part closest to the real thing you’re trying to say.
This version of the imaginary conversation is preparation. Working something out before you try to communicate it. Arriving at the real conversation with more clarity and less noise. Done right, it’s actually considerate — you’ve thought enough to know what you’re actually trying to say, rather than figuring it out at the other person’s expense.
But there’s another version that becomes a substitute. The one where you’ve been having the same internal conversation for three months with no real intention of ever having the external one. The rehearsal has become the thing itself — a place to put the feeling so it doesn’t build up too much pressure, a way to process without actually resolving anything. The discomfort is kept at a manageable level. The source of it is never addressed.
That version isn’t preparation. It’s a pressure valve that prevents the change you actually need from ever becoming urgent enough to pursue.
Most people, if they’re honest, know which version they’re doing.
Permission to Have the Real One
Here’s what I’m not going to tell you: how to have hard conversations. There are approximately four thousand books on that topic, and I suspect you don’t need another framework. The mechanics aren’t the problem.
What I’ll say instead is this: the real conversation will be worse than the imaginary one in almost every way. You won’t make all your points. The other person will say something unexpected and you’ll have to respond in real time, without revision. There won’t be a gallery nodding along. The resolution — if there is one — won’t arrive clean and complete the way it does in the shower version.
And none of that is the same as it going badly.
The shower argument is a solo performance. It can only go the way you direct it. The real conversation is something genuinely shared — unpredictable, imperfect, between two people doing their best with incomplete information and real stakes. Less satisfying in the moment. More significant in every other way.
You keep rehearsing because the thing matters. Something is unfinished, and some part of you knows it, and that part keeps returning to it because it wants things to be different.
You’ve already won the imaginary argument. Many times. You know exactly how it ends.
The real one hasn’t happened yet. Which means it can still go somewhere the imaginary version never could.
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