Globally, the World Health Organization says nearly 20% of the population has hearing loss, around 1.5 billion people, and 430 million have disabling deafness.
As grim as these figures are, there is an even larger number of people across the world who actively choose not to hear, or listen, to what is going on.
The distinction between hearing and listening is an important one. When you hear something, you can quite easily be engaged in another task.
That sound quickly disperses and, unless it is extraordinarily loud or mellifluous, you soon forget it.
Listening, however, is not the passive exercise hearing is. It requires a deliberate effort to pay attention, a mindfulness about what you are hearing, and work to both comprehend and remember it.
When someone is really listening, particularly when it is to another person’s views, they are showing them due respect and are genuinely keen to engage in a constructive conversation.
How many times have you really been listened to recently? And how much have you truly listened to someone else?
When one is being listened to, there are few if any interruptions.
New Zealanders returning from visits to countries such as Japan and others throughout parts of East and Southeast Asia are often shocked to discover how much they are interrupted and talked over here compared with how courteously their words and views were listened to while overseas.
We have all come across those people who love the sound of their own voices and simply cannot resist dominating meetings while others sit quietly.
As the old saying goes, better to keep your mouth shut and look stupid than open it and prove you are.
Listening is the key to understanding and a better world.
Central Otago poet, artist and conservationist Brian Turner, who died on Wednesday, was one of this rare breed of polite listeners. Make a statement or press a point in a discussion with him and he would pause to consider what you had said, think, and then reply carefully and insightfully.
The world needs more listeners like Turner. That is especially the case at a time when there is a great deal of not-listening going on everywhere which, in our view, is stoking the fires of anger and fuelling many of the conflicts and crises across the globe.
Is President Donald Trump listening from the White House? You bet he isn’t. He and his cadre of nest-featherers are the premium members of the non-listening club.
They claim to be representing the average American, the blue-collar workers, the poorest and most vulnerable, but how much listening to their problems have they actually done?
Mr Trump’s wild fancies about the United States taking over Gaza, rebuilding it and turning it into some kind of Middle Eastern riviera, stunned much of a world now used to hearing rambling suggestions designed to inflate his bank balance.
Do you think he was listening to the horrified reaction from most? No. "Everybody loves it", he told reporters.
Non-listening is alive and kicking in New Zealand too. The Treaty Principles Bill proves that. How much feedback, of many kinds, should it have taken to kill off this Bill before it became ingrained into the story of this government and disrupted generally good race relations?
Answer: far less feedback than it has received, if only the prime minister and Act New Zealand leader David Seymour had listened.
When it comes to listening, or not listening more accurately, those iwi members who turned their backs on Mr Seymour and removed the microphone were reflecting, more visibly, how they had been treated.
Listen up, everyone. Really, deeply, consider what others are saying. Allow them the dignity of not being interrupted. That way lies far more important progress than just of the economic kind.
