this happened to me yesterday and im still thinking about it. my coworker was telling me some story about her weekend and i guess my brain just decided to take a little vacation halfway through.
like one second shes talking about going to her sisters house and the next thing i know im nodding and going “oh totally” while having absolutely no idea what i just agreed with.
the problem is once you realize youve been fake listening you cant really recover.
you cant be like hey sorry i was thinking about whether hot dogs are sandwiches for the last 3 minutes can you repeat everything. so you just have to commit to the nod and hope she wasnt telling you about a family emergency or asking to borrow money. she seemed happy with my response though so either i accidentally gave good advice or she was also not really paying attention to what she was saying.
this happens to me way more than it should.
ill be having a conversation and suddenly im like wait what are we talking about but my mouth is still making conversation sounds. its like my social autopilot kicks in and starts running the show while my actual brain goes off to think about random stuff.
like yesterday while she was talking i was genuinely wondering why pizza boxes are square when pizzas are round. which seems like something that should have been figured out by now.
another problem is im getting better at fake listening which is probably not a skill i should be proud of. like i can maintain eye contact and make appropriate noises while mentally reorganizing my netflix queue.