Why do I talk to myself so much? While in grade school, I overheard a self-proclaimed neighborhood savant say that people talk to themselves because they either have money in the bank, or they’re nuts. I took that proclamation as fact, and since I was still in my formative years, that fact stuck for years.
I began talking to myself in my teens. That old saying about why people talk to themselves lingered and left me uneasy even though I had no money in the bank and did not behave like a nut. To overcome the feeling, I talked myself into believing that talking to myself now merely predicted that I’d one day have money in the bank, so I wasn’t nuts after all. I worked and saved into middle-age before I had enough in the bank to tell myself I was okay. In fact, successful internet investments enabled me to graduate from muttering to talking out loud.
By then, everything mankind knew had been uploaded to the internet. I trusted the internet because social media said I could, and you know how smart those social media billionaires are. After a lifetime of uncertainty, I felt I could finally learn the answer to the questions that nearly drove me nuts for years:
Why do people talk to themselves? How often must you talk to yourself for it to qualify and prove you’re not nuts?
Does anyone have to hear you for it to qualify? If you talk to yourself in a foreign language, must you be fluent in that language or can you speak gibberish? If an artificial intelligence application tells you you’re nuts, are you nuts only if you believe in AI?
I yearn for the halcyon days before the introduction of the personal computer or its bastard children, the internet and artificial intelligence. In those days, to learn the definition or proper spelling of words such as halcyon, one had to refer to a dictionary and look it up. Trying to find words I didn’t know how to spell drove me nuts. How do you do that?
While using artificial intelligence to search for answers to my questions, AI told me that talking to yourself may also be a sign of success. If you believe that, only the AI app developers succeeded and you’re probably nuts. And you can take that to the bank.
Bob Aubin lives in Franklin, MA and is a septuagenarian baby boomer learning how to do this for the first time.
