There’s something happening. Do I need to react? We all may feel this pressure. Something’s happening, or something just happened. What do we say? How do I react? What do I put on my social media? If you have a YouTube channel, what do you put on YouTube? Or you’re in a discussion with others, maybe in class or some other group, and someone is saying something and you really feel you have to react.
Do we have to react to everything? No.
This is an impulse that we can hardly refuse anymore. It’s almost as if society is trying to teach us to react all the time. Now, do we always know enough to react? No. But we may have the feeling that we do. So the pressure is there. Maybe our desire is there. Or we’ve been made to feel that we know enough to respond.
Maybe the best reaction is to say, “Wait a moment.” The best answers and the best philosophy often start with the reaction “Wait a moment. Let me think about this. Give me some time. Give me some time to look it up. But first, give me maybe a moment to think about whether I should react at all.”
This is maybe the first mistake many of us are making nowadays, especially when we’re in a group with others. Someone is saying something, waiting maybe for some kumbaya moment, waiting for us to say, “Oh yeah, I agree,” or “Oh yeah, this is horrible. Oh yeah, I know everything about it.” And so on. This leads us to make statements that may not be statements we would really have liked to make in a more sober moment — rather through the intoxication of the moment.
So why are we made to feel that way? Well, it’s very easy. Social media works by monetizing us, our content. Social media wants us all to react so that these platforms make their money, so that they are monetizing our desire to communicate. It’s a human reaction to want to communicate. It’s also oftentimes not a responsible reaction to communicate based on your instinct, based on gut feeling, based on whatever little information we may have.
Sometimes our reaction could just as well be, “I may have an opinion on that. But should I be the person speaking about this now?” Something may be very important that’s happening, but is it your position to speak on it? Is it maybe sometimes better to say, “I certainly have an opinion on this, but I don’t feel that given where I live, given what my experience is, given where I stand, that I should say something on the matter”?
Maybe there’s a topic where we all have deep feelings, but those feelings are contextual based on where we are. Or there’s a long history of people deciding for other people, and only those who scream the loudest or have the most access to communication -—whether it’s technological or relationship-based or power-based — only those have in the past been able to speak.
Sometimes it may be important to just listen and to just work at maintaining your relationships with others by not speaking too fast. I know how difficult that is. I am something of a compulsive communicator. But people won’t listen to you if you speak to everything or just blurt anything out. It matters how we communicate. It matters how we speak. And especially when it comes to topics related to politics, it matters whether we have some relationship to the material and some experience.
That doesn’t mean that our positionality should always prevent us from speaking. That’s not it at all. But we should be aware of our surroundings, our circumstances.
So you may feel I’m a little vague about this. Well, this is part of it. You don’t have to always say what’s on your mind. There’s this great quote in The Godfather: “Don’t ever let them know what you’re truly thinking,” or something like that. There’s some wisdom to that. And the wisdom goes two ways. If other people know what you’re truly feeling about something, they may use it against you if it’s something that may be seen as controversial.
Furthermore, how do we know what we are truly feeling? How do we know what we are truly thinking? Maybe our thoughts and our feelings are much more in flux than we think. So not to always reveal what we are feeling in the moment — maybe that strategy is a good one because it prevents us from making a statement that we later on would like to revise, but the opportunity doesn’t arise anymore.
We’ve all probably been in situations where we said something or wrote an email or a text or whatever, or posted something, and in a few minutes, hours, or days we said, “I shouldn’t have said that. I wish I could go back. I wish I could revise my statement.”
Well, this will always happen, but you can minimize the impact by more carefully crafting a response. Sometimes you should react quickly because sometimes you have to react to a message, and the message needs reaction, and if the answer comes too late, it’s not relevant anymore. But even then, you need to think before you write, and you need to not react to everything with the strength that you would like to react to, but you want to have a measured response.
Someone says something and you feel like, “How could that person think that?” Don’t react with an insult. Don’t react with this attitude. React with an assuming position where you have a measured response, or sometimes no response, and just take it in and enjoy the diversity of opinions out there.
Because you don’t have to react to everything. You don’t have to immediately let others know what you’re thinking. You have that chance. You have that possibility. And you should not judge others for being less communicative than you think they should be. I know it’s deeply ironic that I am saying this on a YouTube video, but here it is.
[This was originally posted to YouTube as a video. This post is a slightly abbreviated transcript, preserving the oral style of the video.]
Erratic Attempts 