Fun with soul-crushing gossip
November 13th, 2009 | Published in Work | 3 Comments
There was an article in the NYTimes the other day about workplace gossip. Considering that office/school/whatever gossip is something that everybody deals with almost all the time in life, it’s funny how little anybody knows about gossip or how to fight it.
I spent about two years working in a place where office gossip compacted my soul just about every day, made me want to scream in my gray cubicle, made me want to wander the streets muttering to myself and drooling; and just about everybody I know over 30 has had a similar experience at least sometime in their lives.
Ralph Steadman drawings tend to flash through my head whenever I hear office gossip, even when it is coming out of my mouth. I think he understands me.
But nobody knows how to deal with gossip, or at least I never do, beyond a.) going along with it and secretly hating yourself, b.) laughing uncomfortably and saying nothing, or c.) saying something about how annoying you think gossip is, and then looking like a loser and risking becoming the target of the apmorphous and cancer-like gossip.
Gossip tends to be pretty toxic and is half the reason I don’t ever want to work in a drab office again. The other half is that I find most offices drab. But if somebody could figure out why gossip happens, how to stop gossip, and what exactly people are trying to accomplish by backbiting and spewing awful shit about each other day in, day out, I would give that person a high five.
So, here’s the article. The only really meaningful suggestion it makes for anti-gossipers is letter (C.) from above. But, still, it’s always good to know that maybe it might make a difference if you’re going to stick your neck out and look like a chode:
The earlier studies found that once someone made a negative comment about a person who wasn’t there, the conversation would get meaner unless someone immediately defended the target. Otherwise, among both adults and teenagers, the insults would keep coming because there was so much social pressure to agree with the others.
I should add that I think it is not really the meanness of gossip that is the really sucky thing about it, but the feeling of powerlessness you experience when you are around someone who is gossipy. Even if you agree with them, or like them, it can be sucky to feel like there is literally nothing you can do to stem the flow of their negativity. And it is usually only a small minority in a group that are the real gossip instigators. Everybody else tends to go along for the ride, I think, because they don’t know how else to deal with it.
Anyway, I’ve had my soapbox moment for the day, I feel better.
: )
November 13th, 2009 at 7:11 pm (#)
This is an interesting topic. I’ve known people, generally office workers over the age of 40, who seem at some point to have emptied most of the interesting things about themselves and their lives out of their heads, and in the hole left thereby dumped all the meaningless, trite crap that comes out as gossip. And I am terrified of this, mostly because I can’t possibly imagine why anybody would do this.
But then I think about, and I think it’s natural, maybe even innocent or well-meaning, in a lot of cases. Because we’re social animals, we humans, and there’s something in our make-up that causes us to yearn for that connection that is dialog. It’s how we create and validate meaning, and in the end it’s how we are ourselves defined. Our role in the dialog of life.
The problem is, I think that this urge usually overshoots our wealth of interesting things to talk about by a long shot. So we chat idly. We talk about what so-and-so said to such-and-such, and oh my God, can you believe that? I can’t! These conversations don’t mean anything, but they are exercising that need to interface.
And the reason it’s so virulent in offices, and other small, closed communities, is that these are small, closed communities. They are closed systems, with very little input of new information or energy from outside. And a closed system stagnates, grinds down, and disorder (or sloth, idle talk, et cetera) increases. That’s entropy.
Eventually, I think the whole thing just starts to devour itself, like some information science version of Lord of the Flies. So people snipe at each other, they politic behind backs, and generally “talk shit.” And it feeds back on itself, like the article kind of says, in that it builds a momentum, and no one person’s input can really stop it once it gets moving.
Yar, that was longer than I’d meant it to be.
November 15th, 2009 at 5:24 pm (#)
I also really like Ralph Steadman.
November 15th, 2009 at 6:12 pm (#)
I agree, gossip sucks…. you said it better though