The Power of NOT Saying Something

Last night, I was frustrated.  I couldn’t activate my new Droid Eris phone, but my old phone had already been deactivated during the transfer process.  Thus, I was temporarily phoneless.

It was after 11 PM, and since Verizon’s customer service center is only open from 6 AM to 11 PM, I had to wait until morning to call them and solve the problem — which, it turns out, required the intervention of a manager, so it wasn’t just user error on my part.

So no, I wasn’t especially dense or incompetent, and no, Verizon’s system wasn’t inexplicably faulty.  It just failed to process a piece of information that I’d presumed it had processed automatically, which resulted in a single night of no phone service for me.

Frustrating?  Sure.  But in the long run, it was no big deal.

Granted, that didn’t stop me from writing a bitter blog post about the whole ordeal.  But it did stop me from publishing it.  Instead, I held it for a day, and in the end I deleted it.

Why?

Because it would have been much ado about nothing, and the world (including me) has more important things to worry about.

Can You Pause Your Own Tragedy And Come Look at Mine?

The real-time nature of social media means we feel compelled to share everything that happens to us, good or bad, because everything we live through is “content” that we can “publish.”  We want people to know what we’re going through because we want them to think our experiences are important.

But when everything’s a big deal, nothing‘s a big deal, and we risk losing sight of the problems that we really should be paying attention to — all because you believe the world needs to share in your momentary frustration.

Wrong.  There’s a big difference between being detained by the border guards and being served the wrong milkshake flavor at Denny’s.  One of those, I might be interested in knowing; sharing the other is just murdering innocent pixels.

Instead of reaching for your drama queen tiara, why not try…

• Rereading the directions
• Retracing your steps
• Searching for an answer online
• Finding an alternate solution
• Walking away and coming back to the problem later, when you’re sober

Nearly anything you do will make more sense than shouting into the void.

And, as a bonus, it saves everyone you know from absorbing your frustration (or, worse, feeling compelled to tell you why they’re SO UPSET at Verizon too).  Such public commisserations about things we can’t change don’t help anyone, but they do create a digital eyesore that’s hard to look away from.

Not that you shouldn’t try to fix the problem, or hold businesses accountable, or complain through the proper channels when you actually have been wronged by someone else.  But that implies that you’re taking proactive steps to create change, rather than limply shaking your tiny little fist at a giant corporate logo.

So before you write your next scathing blog post or send another bile-inflected tweet, do yourself (and everyone else) a favor:

Don’t.

Then, in the morning, if you’re still as pissed as you were the day before, say something.  But don’t make too big deal about it.

Because I have more important things to spend my time on — and so do you.

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Tags: common sense, perception, personal, Social Media, Sociology, technology