There's Something In The Air
Is silence some kind of bug we have to immediately patch?
There's sometimes this awkward silence that suddenly lands on the atmosphere mid-sentence or close to it that makes all parties be on the edge to quickly resolve it, say whatever comes to mind to restart the noise, conversation engine going.
It's almost like people have internalized an unspoken rule that dead air equals social failure, and everyone's frantically trying to avoid being the one responsible for it.
I'm not much perceptive to just utter what comes to mind and do prefer to sit more with the awkward silence, especially when it's with newer people I've started having conversation with. It's a break of sorts, let the reset happen and perhaps, digest too what has been said in a way that isn't okay, I get it, what should I say next type of surface-level engagement.
Coming back to newer people, I more so wonder how do they handle the uncomfortableness of the moment, is it something that they're actively resisting, desperately wanting to break? Or are some of them also sitting there, wondering if they should be the one to say something, feeling that same tension but not knowing if breaking it would be welcomed or if it would just interrupt whatever's naturally happening in that space?
I may be a bit bias here but older people tend to be more chill about it than those of the younger generation, specifically my age bracket of mid 20s to early 30s.
I think a culprit could be found in having our brains already cooked, in terms of being hyperactive/overstimulated with massive unprocessed information. This is to say in another way that people of my age bracket seemed to have been conditioned to treat silence the way they treat a slow internet connection.
Because it's not uncommon to as if subconsciously to quickly grab their phone and escape into another universe the moment that silence hits. 99% of the time it's not even to check anything specific. Just the automatic reach muscle memory of needing to fill the void with something. The phone is a socially acceptable escape hatch from having to exist in an unstimulated moment with another person.
Silence, even though not explicitly mentioned, feels wrong at the moment, and needs to be solved like what we do with all problems that we encounter.
My default reaction is letting out a sigh and scanning the horizon with my eyes to see if something out of the ordinary catches my attention.
That or, I succumb to the irresistible pull to also grab my phone for no specific reason whatsoever. Even when I'm aware of what I'm doing, the impulse is still there. That's how deep this stuff runs, knowing silence is fine doesn't automatically make it translate the same way in practice.
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