I was one of those men who couldn’t stop talking. Here’s how I learned to shut up and listen

I like to talk as much as the next man – and men like to talk. A now-famous study by the University of California, Santa Barbara, noted that, in a series of recorded public conversations between men and women, 48 interruptions occurred, 46 of which came from men. The 2024 Women in the Workplace survey by McKinsey found that nearly 40% of women experienced being interrupted or spoken over “more than others” at work, against 20% of men.

Men in public spaces, according to research, talk more than women, talk over women, and talk down to women, contributing to the rise of gender neologisms such as manologuing, bropropriating and mansplaining. So, aware that men tend to dominate and disrupt, aware that the world at large feels unbearably loud, aware that I, too, often add to that noise, I decided to learn to keep my mouth shut – starting in the general hellscape of social media.

I have often felt compelled, on seeing an idiotic post, to point out its idiocy, as though I alone had noticed it. It’s a compulsion encouraged by the reward-based models of social media platforms. Users think of an interesting thought or response (trigger), send a post (behaviour), receive likes and re-posts (reward). 

The compulsion to post relies on signalling, too – and not just of “virtue”. Read through your social media timelines and, if you’re an overtalker, you’ll find insecurities. Mine read like an exposé of impostor syndrome: barely veiled attempts to appear intelligent. I seldom mentioned the football, but try to stop me posting commentary about Hamlet at the Young Vic, as though my followers were desperate for my “original” takes on Hamlet.

I once live-tweeted my experience reading War and Peace just to show that I was the sort of person who read War and Peace. Life events fell victim to the social media lens. I could not simply enjoy Christmas or birthdays: I framed events in odd ways, repurposed them in pursuit of dopamine. “Books, booze and cherry blossoms,” I once tweeted, after workshopping the image and tagline with my partner on our anniversary. Nothing was sacred, nothing real, everything permitted.

I’ve had social media for nearly two decades, the majority of my life. It seemed obvious that, as I slouched into my mid-30s, I needed a cleanse. I’d already deleted Facebook and Instagram. I kept X but removed all past posts, then only posted links to my writing.

Deleting social apps removes any doubt that social media is addictive. I experienced genuine withdrawal symptoms: a touch of irritability here, a hint of anxiety there. Small-scale Fomo washed over me, as though all the cool kids were hanging out on Elon Musk’s X. But the withdrawal symptoms soon dissipated and left me in a state of embarrassment – embarrassed by my past actions, as if I could not recognise the man I was back then, all those hours ago. The compulsion to opine on any given topic at any given time, that most universal form of entitlement, suddenly seemed a bit silly, a feeling captured by ex-overtalker Dan Lyons in his book STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in a World That Won’t Stop Talking: “The world was not sitting with bated breath, waiting to hear what I would say.”