It occurred to me today that there’s too much talking.
They say, “actions speak louder than words” and “talk is cheap”, but it doesn’t seem to keep people from talking so much.
Where did we lose an appreciation for silence?
It’s not that I have a problem with people talking. Communication is necessary for people to share information with each other. My wife and I try to talk with each other as much as we can to maintain our connection and to maintain the flow of information that we have to share with each other to be effective in our life together, just as an example.
However, there are probably many different types of talking going on these days that are pointless. As a matter of fact, I think that most of us could probably do with a lot less talking coming from our mouths and end up being just fine. Some of the people I respect and admire most in the world speak rarely. When these people do speak, their words have weight and meaning, rather than just being another drop in the very large bucket of drivel that most talkers generate regularly.
But the type of talking that has been irritating me recently is complaining.
If you say that there’s a problem (complain), but you’re not willing to do anything about it (take action), you’re adding to the noise.
I saw a commercial the other night for the census, and this socially-activist couple was talking about all of the change in which they desire to be involved, and the census came up. And the point of the commercial, more or less, was that completing the census is a simple action that one can take toward social change. The verbage in the commercial went something like, “don’t talk about change, be about change”.
I thought the commercial was pretty cool (I filled out the census weeks ago, so it wasn’t really speaking to me), and it got me to thinking.
I think the problem with people talking so much and acting so rarely is a question of effort. It doesn’t cost us anything to complain. But, action is this whole big thing where I have to get up and get organized to plan a response to an issue that’s really bothering me and that just seems like so much work, so maybe I’ll just sit here and complain instead.
You get the idea.
So, naturally, we need to make complaining more expensive than action. I propose a tax.
We will call it the grumble tax. Whenever someone complains about something, they will have to pay the grumble tax. It will be so expensive that people will stop complaining. Rather, they will, either, 1) realize that they aren’t that upset about the things that they were prepared to complain about, at least not upset enough to pay the grumble tax, and end up just keeping their mouth shut, or 2) just get up and go about fixing the things that they were going to complain about because it would be less expensive in the long-term than paying the grumble tax.
Sure, my plan has some flaws, but it also has MERIT.
In my hypothetical world where it is now hypothetically expensive to pay the hypothetical grumble tax, it would be interesting to see, hypothetically, whether this tax would result in sweeping social, political, moral, and/or economic changes –imagine, people just running around fixing all of the things that are so broken– or if it would just lead to less noise.
I suspect we would probably see the latter.
Are the things that we tend to complain about really that bad? Are they even within our control to change? Are we really being significantly impacted by the injustices on our lips?
Maybe things aren’t that bad. Maybe there really isn’t that much that cries out for change in the world around us. Maybe we complain because it gives us something to say, a viewpoint to express in this world where it seems to be increasingly more and more important that we 1) have an opinion on something, and 2) express it to others.
Maybe we just complain because we are uncomfortable in the silence.
It Occurred To Me Today 