Hey listen – Portugal Resident

I ask because every time I start a query lately, someone under 50 jumps in with, “because attention spans” or “it’s the algorithm” or “actually what happens is”, before I reach the question mark. This fascinating modern affliction is an inability to let another human complete a sentence without treating it like one giant collaborative task.

The younger generation does not have conversations anymore. What they have instead are relay races where as soon as one begins speaking, someone grabs the baton after six words, sprints confidently in the wrong direction, and then looks back triumphantly, as though they have helped the speaker.

Listening intently, once upon a time, was considered a social skill. Now it is viewed as dead air, where silence is attacked immediately, preferably with an opinion or an anecdote. I recently attempted to tell my young and friendly neighbour about a bizarre incident involving a pressure cooker and a pigeon.

Before I got to the bird, he had guessed cat, duck, drone, gas leak and Iran invasion – every option except the one that had actually happened. The result was that, in the end, I lost interest in my own story.

The current young listener just sort of stands by the way one stands by a kettle, you know? In other words, they are present, technically attentive, but really just waiting for the click that indicates they can move on to the next thing.  Which happens the moment one takes a breath to gather one’s thoughts. Meanwhile, they already form an opinion, and begin another activity, like typing into the group chat.

It is not that they are unkind, not at all. It’s just that they have been raised on content designed to be abandoned because every video can be swiped away, song skipped and show binge-watched at double speed, because nobody has time for the natural pace of a human voice anymore. A person telling a story does not have a skip button, and this, I suspect, is deeply upsetting to a generation that has never had to sit through anything it did not choose.

And so they interrupt. They do so not to argue but to finish, as though one’s sentence was a crossword clue they alone could solve, and withholding the answer would be cruel. They also do this with the tender conviction of people helping elderly relatives across a road they did not ask to cross.

If my sentence wobbles for a split second, several young voices jump in to steady it, each contribution a different adaptation. None of the conclusions are mine, mind you, but by the time I reclaim the story, it has been workshopped so mindlessly that it no longer resembles what had actually happened. This is tiresome.

Therefore, rather than correcting them, I have started agreeing with all versions of the story endings that are offered to me.

“Listen, the traffic was so bad that…” I related yesterday.

“You had a meltdown,” guessed my nephew.

I nodded.

“You missed your appointment,” said his wife.

I nodded again.

“You want to order in dinner,” our daughter prompted.

I nodded once again.

Read Nickunj Malik’s last month’s article: The Portuguese art of saying ‘não sei’