I’m not listening to you. Not because I’m a very famous in my own mind blogger and I don’t have to listen to you, or because this is obviously not a real conversation, I mean when we are together in person I’m not listening to you. You see I have my phone in front of me – placed just so I can pretend I’m listening to you and still see the screen – and when my eyes widen as you speak I’m actually reading this very funny text that says “Make America Great Britain Again!” and what you’re saying is less funny, though I’m sure no less important. Oh, and JJ Redick just tweeted about something to do with basketball. For some reason I subscribed to his twitter account and now I love seeing his name come up in my alerts. And I’ve just got four mails. oh and it’s 5.52pm and I had planned to be at a yoga class by 6.30. The class is led by Kyle…no Louise, or maybe Jenn….wait, do you mind I’m going to check the app real quick under the pretense it’s work related so it seems really important to actually not listen to you rather than pretend I’m listening and not listen to you.
Okay the 6.30 class on Thursday’s is Kyle’s class, go on. The other thing I should tell you is I’m not the only one not listening to you. At any given moment someone else you’re talking to is watching that video where the rabbit is being cleaned by a cat. Someone else is getting BBC News alerts – Rolling Stones say no to Donald Trump, shocking – and someone else just got a bunch of hearts on their Instagram and they probably want to see if it’s for the yummy pork wonton picture or the palm tree sunset.
Is it because you’re boring? Is it because you don’t have a rabbit getting a cat cleaning worthy piece of conversation? I mean maybe we should all try to have cat and rabbit level conversation every now and then, but no it’s not really that either. Is it because what you’re saying is taking quite long and you should try to condense the emotions you have right now into 15 seconds, like an Instagram video? Not at all.
I’m not listening because I’m on my phone, or laptop, or tablet, mailing, chatting or texting someone who is also mailing, chatting, texting or looking at a sad ad about moms which she’ll send to someone who is also mailing, chatting, texting, reading or looking for the pizza emoticon, so none of us in the whole wide world are listening. To you, or one another.
Why? Chances are you’ve already forgotten what I’m even talking about right now because you aren’t listening to me either. None of us are listening, because everyone one of us is doing something else.
It’s the greatest elephant in boardrooms today, that no one even knows is there because we aren’t listening to its loud and incessant trumpeting, we are typing emails. Or we are leaving the room mentally to go to Facebook because – I don’t know – maybe someone just posted something so important that the person who was up all night and is presenting now really won’t mind if you look at it really quickly. Oh yes look. Magnus is growing new daffodils on his verandah. So pretty!!!!
At dinner we aren’t listening because, look JJ Redick tweeted again! It’s a video with him and Melissa McCarthy in The Boss. He should see the cat rabbit cleaning, even funnier. I know we got together so we could all have dinner and catch up but maybe we can all just get on our phones and sit in silence together?
At night we aren’t even listening to the shows we got all the texts about to watch because maybe there’s a mail from one of the people who wasn’t listening in the boardroom meeting earlier, looking for clarification.
As humans we now shift between the online world and the offline world every forty-five seconds. I heard that from Gloria Mark who was interviewed on the radio station KCRW while I was driving.
I should probably tell you that I’m also not really paying attention while I’m driving, and I’m quickly going to see if I can Google who the hell JJ Redick actually is, and Gloria Mark. And don’t honk to make me go faster or tell me it’s dangerous – haven’t you already heard? I’m not listening damnit! Quiet your sirens.
While I’m coming clean – at the grocery store where I shop – I’m going to use the moment while someone nice rings up my groceries to see if there’s any new news anywhere, oh look now Magnus is having cocktails by the daffodils. This means I’ll probably hold up the whole line because when the cashier asks me if I need bags, or if I want cash back I’ll be, you know….I feel like you’re starting to hear me now.
And let’s talk about sidewalks quickly. I’m going to treat them more as side stops and I’m going to stand right in the middle looking to see where I am on my phone because even though this is a very busy city with people all around me, I’m deaf to you all because I’m in my own universe where the soundtrack is me, me, me and JJ Redick.
If by chance you’ve not clicked away from this riveting post I’ve taken my hours of my time to write and even spell check (Redick’s name doesn’t come up in autocorrect) then I have one thought to impart. Should we go back to listening?
As we strive to get more done at work by working on everything else in every meeting, I think we could get even more done if we hear one another. Or if we just say, “I get it, are we done?” and we can be done pretending to listen because we’ve both got it.
As we struggle to find time to all hang out together at one dinner I think we should we actually have dinner, and not be the Silent Bobs in the corner all looking phones.
And how about we start saying hi to the Wholefoods cashier, make eye contact. None of us want hear how much we’re paying there, but the people who put the sixty dollar blueberries in a bag might want to hear you say, thank you.
Maybe let’s also all stop texting on highways going sixty miles an hour and just listen to the radio too. We might hear someone like Gloria Mark saying that if we do one thing at a time, it is scientifically better for us. We burn through less glucose, exhausting ourselves less with decisions as we jump from one thing to another. We crash less, literally and figuratively. Technology is amazing, it brings us together. It’s how you get to read this amazing blog and retweet it and repost it and say how much you love it. But, as Gloria says, it’s built to suck you back in again and again. Is that the sound of Mark Zuckerberg’s bank account filling I hear?
So, how about today we all try looking up, and listening.
Thanks for listening. Look, JJ Redick just tweeted.