11.26.2025

Recently, a former colleague of mine posted a lovely essay on their blog about the joy of meeting new people.

I wish I could say the same.

It’s not that I dislike people — honestly, that’s not the case at all.

What I struggle with are Extroverts With No Self-Awareness, or EWNSA’s. They are the marathon talkers of the modern world, capable of sustaining a single narrative thread long past its expiration date. After spending an hour with an EWNSA over a cup of coffee, all I want to do is join a monastery where everyone has taken a vow of silence, including the Mother Abbess.

Now, I realize this epidemic of verbal overflow might be a lingering side effect of the pandemic of 2020–23. After so much isolation, people are still relearning how to reconnect. But some folks have taken “connection” as a one-way street, paved entirely with their own experiences that they feel compelled — no, obligated — to share.

They meander through their stories like tour guides of their own memories, expecting you to remember every twist and turn of their lives (as well as the cast of characters who inhabit it): the cousin’s boyfriend or the coworker’s mother-in-law or the neighbor’s son’s wife. And if you dare ask, “Wait, who’s that again?” they look at you as if you’ve bet their entire life savings on the Final Jeopardy category “ME, MYSELF, AND I” — and then had the audacity to get the answer wrong.

When they finally pause for air — usually around the 85-minute mark of a 90-minute lunch — they toss out a perfunctory, “So what’s new with you?” (as they start scrolling through their phone). By then, I’m so overwhelmed by the sound of their droning that all I can muster is, “Oh, you know… same old, same old,” which they take as their cue to pick up exactly where they left off.

The only thing that makes this worse — oh yes, it does get worse — is when they tell the same story over and over again. The one you know verbatim because you’ve heard it so many times you could perform it as a dramatic monologue.

When they misstate a name or a location or another pertinent fact in the story, part of me wants to ask, “Wait, isn’t your ex-sister-in-law’s brother’s name Frank?” But I don’t, because it’s like trying to get off a congested verbal highway with no exit ramp. Best to pull over to the side of the road and wait it out; that level of detail only matters to the passenger (kidnapped victim), not the driver (verbal terrorist).

I can’t help but remember my mom, who, in her waning days in the nursing home, developed a unique strategy for dealing with EWNSA’s long before I had a name for them. When well-intentioned visitors stopped by to “cheer her up” and launched into one of their endless personal stories instead, she would tell them in no uncertain terms, “I’m not interested in what you have to say.” Then she’d go back to reading her book or navigating cable channels with her TV remote.

At the time, I was horrified. Now I consider it a form of social self-defense. And like mother, like daughter, I may start using this tactic myself.

I recently learned that the average person speaks approximately 150 words per minute. That means that for every hour spent with an EWNSA, one’s brain is forced to process roughly 9,000 words — the length of a novella or about one-third the length of Shakespeare's longest play, Hamlet. Your only hope is that there's an intermission so you can get out of Dodge (or in this case, Denmark) ASAP.

For those of us who are introverts (and rather solitary by nature), spending time with EWNSAs can be exhausting. (This is especially true during the holiday season, so buckle up, my quiet cohorts.)

Even though I'm fond of the EWNSAs in my circle, after spending an hour with them, all I want to do is go home and bask in the peace and serenity of my condo, where even the refrigerator knows not to hum louder than a whisper.

“The Sound of Silence,” written by Paul Simon and performed by Simon & Garfunkel (Columbia Records, 1964).

** For those who are interested, William Shakespeare's play, Hamlet, contains 30,557 words. The character, Hamlet, has approximately 4,000 lines.