SILENCE IS GOLDEN
(Original Image by Kristina Flour)
Silence is golden, and yet we speak ad nauseam. We ramble on about our goals and dreams and the people who screwed us. We implore understanding and empathy. And our voices can be deep and booming, or soft and fluttering, but the content of our words are often the same. I need work. I need a woman (or man). I need to get lucky. I’m lonely. I’m angry. I drink too much. I need exercise. I want to kill myself. This is the universal human language from which we draw like a well that’s been filled one drop at a time over millennia.
And yet, silence is golden. It’s worth its weight in gold in terms of protection. For, if you never speak, no one will know who you are or what you believe and, thus, will be unable to criticize you… except for being introverted. It’s also a surefire way to isolate yourself from friends and strangers alike. And, let me tell you, you can only ring that bell once or twice before everyone starts to leave you alone.
Come to think of it, that’s my biggest problem with this social media era. These sites and apps have transformed interactions — presumably with friends and family — into currency, and so you end up grocery shopping for posts you find agreeable while leaving the more brash, controversial ones on the rack to spoil. As a result, the purveyors of such posts, either good or bad, are led subconsciously into a system of human commerce where one must advertise themselves and their lives to draw more interaction. One must adopt the most popular social and political beliefs of the time in order to appease potential shoppers. One must fashion echo chambers adorned with activist slogans in order to validate their customer base while simultaneously discouraging the competition. Then, by virtue of social gravity, ideological factions and religions are formed with regular, and increasingly strict purity tests to affirm one’s faith in the cause.
It’s scary how many people say the exact same thing… especially when, years ago, they said the exact opposite. Slowly but surely, we have surrendered our independence, emptied our critical faculties in the name of convenience, only to become vessels filled with the machinations of corporations, politicians, and adversarial governments. We’ve become the living, breathing personas of cynical ideology. Our eyes have been smeared with self-righteousness. Our ears have been covered by headphones pumping the same rote as we work and clean and ride the light rail into Sacramento proper. We are at the tip of the authoritarian spear. We are both the promulgators and victims of a long, sophomoric con: that if we only say the right words at the right time to the right people, we can kill our loneliness and fear. Well, my friend, silence is golden… if only because it beats the alternative.
