I understand why elderly folks, especially those who live alone, will talk and talk and talk. I try to keep this in mind as my dotage approaches, and I try to watch for cues that I’m boring whoever I’m with. I wish more people would make that effort.
Of course, if you find yourself endlessly fascinating, you may not recognize that no one else does.
Have you ever had to pull a family member aside and let them know they did this sort of thing? “Sweetie, you know I love you, but you’re putting everyone into a coma…”
I worked with someone who didn’t ramble…she pounced. Intense, pressured speech. Wide eyes. She even occasionally patted my chest with her hand to emphasize every word. Like the world would explode if I didn’t catch every syllable.
Gad, I seem to run into a conversational monopolizer every damn day. Drives me batty. Thing is, it’s usually on the subject of our business. I call someone about a job or a new project I need their collaboration with and it’s off to the races! My concepts or contributions are mown over without a breath. I can barely get a question or clarification in.
The other type is someone who wants to tell me their life story or worse yet, the life story of someone else who I don’t know and doesn’t have any impact on my life in any way. This sort of shit has led me to be a bit aloof and stand-offish in public. I hate being that way, but I really don’t give a flying handshake about the career path of the retired lineman that you met in a bar one night.
This makes me crazy, even when it’s not a monopolizer. My inlaws are very sweet people, but when they start telling us about the woes of their neighbors, I fight to keep my eyes from glazing over. It’s not that I don’t care about their neighbors - I don’t know their neighbors. I live 800 miles away and see them once or twice a year, if that much.
Luckily, it’s fairly easy to redirect them - I won’t cut them off right away, but I won’t have to listen till my eyes glaze over. Some people aren’t that easy to derail.
To the extent that I ever interact with conversational monopolisers - which is not often, though there have been some memorable examples - I can actually spend quite a long time observing their technique with awe. I’m fairly sure that if someone walked up to me in the street with “Hey, this is a rambling experiment - talk about anything you like for as long as you can, and I’ll pay you a hundred dollars a minute” I’d be quite likely to walk away with fifty bucks in my pocket. So I’m kind of fascinated with people who can come up with another sentence on the fly. And another. And another. And another.
I can think of a few IT workplaces that could absorb a person or two like that. Put 'em on a leash and walk them round the various departments once an hour, provide a bit of a change from normal.
Dunno, I’m the exact opposite. I find absolutely nothing awkward about silence. I do not engage in small talk under any circumstances. I generally have nothing to say to anyone about anything. I try to get through every day without speaking a complete sentence to anyone, and I usually succeed.
I notice this is true for people over 60 especially.
What I notice about them is that those people tend to not be able to conjure abstract ideas. They express an idea which may take one sentence or two with abstract terms with only concrete examples, taking much much longer. Once you have all those concrete verbiage primed in mind, it is much easier to find a tangent hook because you have so much content spilled, and the cycle continues.
