You’re Talking A Lot, But You’re Not Saying Anything
I talk too much. At work, especially, people have told me: too many words. I tell them, “I know this.” I tell them at length about the many times people have told me this before.
I do my best not to talk. I join most meetings with every intention of not speaking a word. I mute my Zoom connection and sit on my hands so I won’t be tempted to click the unmute button. I pray no one will utter the fatal words, “Steve, what are your thoughts?”
When I know it’s unavoidable that I’ll have to talk, I plot out what I want to say. I make an effort to pre-assemble the words, reduce them to the essential few that will convey my meaning. I rehearse them in my head. I time myself.
When I have to speak ad hoc, I consciously look for the point when I can and should stop talking. I ask myself: am I saying anything new? Am I adding value? Do people really need to hear this? If the answer is no, which it usually is, I do my best to cut things short.
People I respect, people who do not talk too much yet manage to make themselves understood, have suggested I do these things, and I do them. I do them at every opportunity, and still: I talk too much. By the end of the week, my voice sounds like a bad phone connection.
Folks probably think I must love to hear myself talk, but nothing could be further from the truth. A lot of things make me tired these days, but none more so than the sound of my own voice.
Our younger child asks me: “How do people talk?”
I think what she means is: how do people engage in fluid conversations? How do people create sentences on the fly, knocking words between each other like they’re playing a casual game of verbal pickle ball?
I tell her that a lot of conversation is small talk. One person says something open ended: how’s it going. The other person says: ugh, the rain. Person 1: so much rain … it rained yesterday and the day before, and it’s still raining. Person 2: I think it’s supposed to stop overnight but it’s probably coming back tomorrow. Person 1: I was walking the dogs last night and it was horizontal rain. Person 2: that sounds fun. We have cats, so. Person 1: lucky. Person 2: yeah, except we have an older cat who half the time misses the litter box. Person 1: oof, guess there’s always something. Person 2: always something. And so it goes.
Our kid gives a look of disgust at the words “small talk.” She doesn’t want to just talk. She wants to say something, and have the other person say something. She wants the things they’re saying to have meaning, to be funny or surprising or interesting. Her real question is, “How do people say things?”
She is 14, living in semi-quarantine, communicating with the world through texts. In more normal times, she would be learning how to say things in person, in real time. This is the age when her brain is physically rewiring itself to manage social interactions. She feels the itch; her brain wants something it isn’t getting.
I tell her the truth: I don’t know how people say things. I’ve been trying to figure that out my whole life.
When I’m talking, I always think, in the moment, that I’m saying things. This is why my best intentions — to edit myself, to be pithy, to be quiet — always fail. I may not love the sound of my own voice, but I do suffer from the persistent folly that other people are actively listening to me.
I sometimes think about how the animals in our lives perceive our chatter. We have two dogs, and most of the time our talking must seem to them like the wah-wah of the adults in Charlie Brown cartoons, an unintelligible fog of sounds emanating from our sound holes. Every once in a while, a sound comes from us that makes their ears perk up: their names, “food,” “squirrel,” “walk,” “outside.” Sometimes they have to hear it a few times for it to register in all the noise.
What I forget 90% of the time is that it is the audience, not the speaker, who determines if you are saying something. If I speak the word “squirrel” when our dogs are nearby, I’m saying something because it is a word that pierces their consciousness. When I say to them something like “white nationalist terrorism is this country’s most urgent threat,” I’m just blathering.
Humans are not significantly different from dogs in this way. When other people are talking, we tune in to select, specific things. The rest of the words are filler.
The art of learning how to say something is the art of getting through to your audience, whether that audience is your dog, your friend, your co-workers, or your followers. It is an art for which I have no talent. I say a lot of words; too few of them are the right ones.
Our soon-to-be-ex-President talks too much. He will get up in front of the crowds at his red-hatted rallies and natter on for over an hour, streaming his warped, neo-fascist consciousness through his sound hole. For me it’s an especially grating form of Charlie Brown adult sounds, a torrent of furious, incoherent wah-wah noise.
His supporters, obviously, hear something very different. Woven throughout his ramblings, he drops words that say something to his audience. Many of the January 6th insurrectionists, when asked why they stormed the Capitol, have have said they acted because their president asked them to “fight.” The word “stolen” in reference to the election, repeated over and over by the President and Republican elected officials and right-wing media outlets, now has the same effect on millions of Americans as the word “squirrel” has on our dogs.
I have a lot of wishes for our world right now, but chief among them is that we elevate principled leaders who understand the difference between talking and saying. I know personally how hard it is to know which is which; after fifty years of trying, I’m not sure I’ll ever get it right. But at a time when malevolent actors like the President have figured it out, it is a matter of extreme urgency that those who oppose him do the same.