How Often Do We REALLY Talk To One Another...How Often Do We Listen?

Less and less actual communication takes place today. People text, message, and pic chat their every thought, at the instant they think it. The trouble is that when it comes to face-to-face conversation, fewer and fewer people seem capable of doing it. 

With the ability to tap out and send a message, comes the expectation of an instant response. Aside from the shortened patience and attention spans, people have become unable to sit through another person speaking without interrupting and talking over them. I've heard it time and again in public, and it leaves me wondering exactly where we are headed as a society.

Relationships that either go on when they shouldn't or last an eighth of the time they should all because people cannot step outside of themselves and their own need to be heard. Verbal volleying, increasing voice levels, and eventual arguments are the only results when the main form of communication is done through social media and messaging sources. How anyone hopes to form functional relationships with meaning without first learning the importance and skill of effective, face-to-face communication. 

Schools are relying heavily on technology to teach, cutting back on the kind of curriculum that encourages reasoning and appropriate consideration of facts over an acceptable time frame. We are so fixated on instant gratification that we have lost sight of things that are truly gratifying, because we no longer wait and work for the things we want. Too few people ever succeed at much, because they give up before they have really started when the results don't come in the first five minutes. 

If we don't find a way to fit some of the 'old' ways of doing things into this life, we are headed for unhappy and unfulfilled days. Those of us who still remember when, would do well to pick up the craft of personal, non-technological communication and remind ourselves what it means to listen and express ourselves effectively, without losing sight of what it all means because our attention spans are severely shortened. And sharing this lost art with the younger generations is what will get us out of the mire we are so entrenched in.