TMI

Several months ago, there were a few days in a row in which I saw someone with a t-shirt that said something like "I see your lips moving, but all I hear is BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH", or "It's cute how you think I'm listening". Perhaps my running into this series of shirts was just a fluke, but I found this barrage of apparent indifference to other people rather disconcerting. How, I felt, could we possibly function as a society, especially a society that will increasingly need more connections with the rest of the world, not fewer, if we went around shutting out all attempts at communication? It made me want to get a counter-shirt that read, simply, "listen", or, if one were more sarcastically inclined, "to listen, perchance to hear".

Of course, this is not to say that I give the same level of attention to all forms of demands on my attention, nor possibly could I. (My wife or Fox News? Hmmm....) It is quite true that in most of the U.S., at least anywhere that people watch TV, there are constant demands on our attentions: attempts to sell us things, requests to contribute time or money to a legion of good causes, queries about the completion of work projects, desires to go to lots of fun entertainment possibilities, and the never-completed household tasks... just reading all that is tiring. Of course people resent it sometimes. And the absorption with one's self to the exclusion of others has a long tradition in the American character.

But, nonetheless, surely we can accept what we want to listen to and politely refuse the rest. I hope it's not just I who would privilege interactions with the people directly in front of me, the people who will be reading my t-shirt. Part of the reason I take offense at people being proudly inconsiderate is my own self-effacing personality. I'd usually rather be mildly inconvenienced myself than know that I was annoying someone else. But I think the deeper reason it bothers me is the irony that people who ignore others probably aren't paying attention to themselves, either. If we never pay attention, life becomes an endless series of preferences and distractions before we die, with no way to become aware of what we all have in common.