Hey, Big Spender: Why Talk Is Cheap

Hate To Break It To You is a recurring feature wherein we dispense succinct home truths that everyone could benefit from facing up to, unpleasant as they may be.

The more you are actually engaged in the highs and lows of life, the less time or inclination you have to dissect them in public detail. You’re too busy living through them to bother issuing press releases as to which way the emotional wind is blowing today and then eagerly monitoring the responses to your sharing. You realize that you can’t capture the poignancy of what it feels like to experience this, right here, right now in 140-characters or less and you place a greater importance on actually being present in this moment than on gauging how best to distill its poignancy into a soundbyte. Believe it or not, there are folks out there like that. And you’re never gonna hear a peep out of them.

Photo by Tayrawr Fortune

The people who are truly struggling with getting out of bed in the morning, keeping themselves together, shattered by grief or illness or simply overwhelmed, aren’t trawling for cyber hugs and cute animal pics. They’re trying to make it through the day. When push comes to shove, playing for public pathos isn’t even on the radar. Surviving trumps surveying the internet peanut gallery for moral support.

And the same goes for happiness, for accomplishment. Is your joy incomplete if you don’t get it externally validated? Do you really have to update your Facebook status from the top of the Ferris wheel at the Montana State Fair in order to preserve the wonder of that moment for posterity? Couldn’t you just, you know, STFU and enjoy said moment as it happens?

I’m so over this compulsion toward narration and color commentary and pithy little battles of wit that our 24/7 internet world fosters. It’s a thousand supermarket checkout conversations, a million first date getting-to-know-you chats, an uncountable number of holiday newsletters, every New Year’s resolution you ever made, rolled into one big ball of noise. And I leave every exchange hungrier than the last for something, anything of genuine, unedited substance that cuts through the static.

Your life isn’t performance art (unless you’re Lady Gaga or James Franco).  It’s for living, not mining for anecdote potential. And eventually, talking (about what you have, what you want, the abstract, the quotidian, the flavor of the week) gets tiring, both for you and your listeners. It rings hollow, a disingenuous and unfulfilling proxy for action and emotion and yes, participation. Talk is cheap. Talk is ephemeral. Talk makes you feel a part of something even as the more you talk, the further you distance yourself from the real something of life and connections with other human beings that aren’t based on commenting on each others’ blogs or giving the thumbs up to someone’s spring break photo album.

There’s more out there. If and when you find it or if and when you decide to put your money and forward momentum where your mouth is, let me know.