Stop Talking and Say Something

People talk to me a lot. They talk about their jobs, or their wife or their kids or their cars or their vacation... do you see a pattern?

What people don't seem to do though is say anything. Anything meaningful anyway. Yesterday someone said to me that I was being quiet and I realized that I was, because I had nothing meaningful to add to their conversation and for whatever social derogative my hesitation to play along made them uncomfortable.

This is because we have all grown far to used to making noise come out of our mouths than saying anything that is worth being heard. Just watch TV or listen to the radio for five minutes and you get an earful of useless spoken sound.

In general, people love to hear themselves. It serves as a kind of positive reinforcement that what they believe is true and correct because it is being said out load.

Not true.

Just because you talk about your opinion on a subject doesn't make it valid. I can say that the world is full of idiots all day long but it doesn't make it true. But if I were to tell you that the average IQ in the United States was estimated at 98 meaning that for the US at least 150,000,000 people are of below average intelligence (idiots), I would be saying something with meaning.

Now obviously we can't talk with one another in long strings of fact and statistic, but for godsakes when you are having a conversation with someone try to add something worth while.

The other side of this coin is that many people prefer talking to listening. The very act of listening to someone for many people is really just an exercise in not talking. I know someone in particular, who many of you that know me personally will be able to immediately identify, that loves to hear himself talk, but has absolutely no interest in hearing what you have to say about whatever ridiculous or offensive monologue that he is delivering. There are so many people that I could name that love to tell you all about their shit, and fill their litanies with rhetorical questions but rarely even take a breath to let you offer a thought that I could do an entire site dedicated to these types of people. They do this because they don't really want to listen to you, they just want you to listen to them.

There is probably, most certainly, auto-therapeutic element to all this one-sided conversing. Sometimes we just need to vent or we need to hear the words spoken. Take not of this behavior in yourself and remember when your listener needs a turn at the mic to spout, shut up.

With all due respect
The Chief