The Ten Unskillful Behaviors: Useless Talk
Useless talk is often translated as “idle talk” or “gossip.” My teacher on this topic, Geshe Roach, preferred the translation “useless talk,” and I think it’s pretty good. Another translation might be “automatic talk” or “unconscious talk.”
There’s a tendency to think of useless talk as some kind of moral failing. This is a mistake on several levels. First, it’s actually a deep part of human behavior. Human beings are social animals. Like all of the unskillful behaviors, it’s something that we are inclined to do automatically. So a person who engages in this behavior isn’t a bad person, or an immoral person. They are a perfectly normal person.
In my practice as a meditation teacher, I regularly have conversations with people who have had deep insights, and who suddenly realize that they don’t like socializing anymore. One of the reasons they don’t like socializing anymore is that socializing is, by default, mostly useless talk.
In a typical social setting, most people will find themselves saying things, quite automatically, in order to be part of the conversation. This will be true of everyone who is in the conversation. It will feel uncomfortable to be silent. And yet, particularly for a person who has recently had a profound insight, mindfulness will be so strong that it will also feel uncomfortable to participate: every word coming out of your mouth will feel useless, will feel like it’s feeding something you want dead.
Why is this? Useless talk is a type of social talk, so if we are to address it, it will be helpful to consider the purpose of social talk in general. I won’t claim to be an expert, but I can name some obvious benefits:
It lets us find our place in the social hierarchy indirectly: without a confrontation that might prove risky.
When communicating with strangers, it allows us to get a sense of the posture that the stranger holds towards us.
It serves as a mechanism for conveying social information.
It helps me to build a picture of myself that can be reinforced both by how what I say is received, and how people engage with me.
It allows me to convey to others how I feel about them: that I love them, that I like them, that I don’t like them but willingly tolerate them, and so on.
It is a way for me to express feelings and worries that make me uncomfortable, and feel heard and comforted when people engage with what I say.
This is not an exhaustive list, but I think it gets the point across that social talk is not useless. So why is useless talk useless?
The reason I suggested “automatic talk” or “unconscious talk” earlier is that I think it conveys an important distinction between social talk generally and useless talk.
When I was in my teens and twenties, I really wanted to fit in, and I was still learning how to do that. I remember trying very hard to engage in social talk, wishing I were glib, that I could easily respond to conversational gambits with witty replies. I had role models—my father, my mother, some of their friends, even some of my friends who already had learned how to be glib.
At some point during this period, I got to the point where I was able to be part of the ongoing conversation and to say something that made sense in the conversation and was timed appropriately, so that it felt like I was part of the dance and not a wallflower. Unfortunately, what came out of my mouth wasn’t really very much in my control. I can remember saying some deeply mortifying things during that time, and only realizing it after I was done talking.
Often I was repeating things that my role model had said: things that I didn’t even really understand, but that seemed to fit into the conversational setting.
A more recent example of useless talk that was pretty mortifying actually comes from my practice of teaching meditation and awakening: I gave someone seemingly appropriate meditation advice.
How was that useless talk? There were a couple of problems. First, it was a comment on someone’s public blog. This wasn’t someone I knew particularly well, although I’d been following their blog for several years. So the context for offering that advice was really inappropriate. But what I realized afterwards was that one of the reasons I’d followed this particular person’s blog was that I’d met them a few times and saw that they were having trouble, and wanted to help.
This might seem like a great motivation, but the problem was that i didn’t pay much attention to what I was doing. When I made the comment, I was operating on automatic. I didn’t have a purpose in mind. I hadn’t thought about whether or not what I said would help the person on whose blog post I was commenting. I just typed in an automatic response, the same sort of response I’d offer to anyone who presented with the particular problem this person was describing in their blog.
So this aspect of “automatic talk” seems like an important part of what makes useless talk useless. I’m saying something that seems appropriate to the topic of the conversation, without any real awareness of what effect saying it would have.
One of the bits of advice that we hear, which is also a natural reaction that some people have when they wake up to this problem in one way or another, is to just shut up. Stop engaging in social talk. Even avoid socializing. This isn’t necessarily a bad reaction: going on a month-long silent retreat can be a great way to increase mindfulness of speech, because you’ve been avoiding it for so long. When you come out, every time you open your mouth, you notice. For a while, at least.
Some Buddhist practitioners carry this practice to an extreme: they become hermits, or enter a monastic setting where everybody agrees to just avoid social talk: to only talk when there is some obvious need to communicate. I’m certainly not going to say that this is a wrong approach—it really depends on what you want to do with your life.
But it’s not an approach that is easy to follow out in the non-monastic world. In the world most of us live in, if you do not engage in social talk, it’s going to dramatically affect how people perceive you, and probably not in a very helpful way. You will be seen as standoffish, distant, unfriendly, weird. You may find that people try harder to engage you in social talk, particularly if they aren’t strangers. Brushing off this sort of probing is likely to make things worse.
From a practice perspective, I think there are two important things to consider when coming up with a strategy for how to address this. First, social talk is not useless. The needs I expressed above, and possibly other needs I didn’t express, are real needs. Second, automatic talk can be quite harmful: how can I be more mindful of what I say?
Maybe go through the list above and talk about strategies for accomplishing each goal for oneself, and strategies for cooperating with others in getting what they need relating to each goal.
Maybe talk about the practice of listening behind what is said, both as a way of engaging better, and also as a way of getting into the mindset of thinking about what one needs to say to engage.
Other approaches?