Our Mouths Keep Moving

This blog post is a chapter in a new part from an upcoming Expanded Edition of my book.

Welcome to The Reckoning.

I wrote once that we’re watching each other die inside.

I didn’t realize then how loud it would get.

Every sentence a scream for relevance. Every confession a brand strategy. We talk like thunder and listen like corpses. Meaning decays in real time — chewed up by applause, spat out as content. You know the taste of it — the metallic tang of meaning turned into marketing. You scroll, nodding, pretending you’re only observing. The feed doesn’t care if we’re honest, only if we’re loud. So we keep talking, louder, emptier, hungrier, until even truth sounds like advertising copy.

No one listens anymore — we just wait for our turn to speak. Every conversation is a hostage situation. Every silence feels like death, so we fill it with noise. You’d rather drown than pause. A quiet moment feels like guilt, and guilt doesn’t trend. Posts, takes, updates, outrage, thinkpieces, apologies, retractions, explanations, clarifications, all collapsing into static. You can almost hear the collective heartbeat of a planet terrified of being irrelevant. Every thought has a price tag. Every word competes for oxygen. And the louder we shout, the smaller we sound.

Once, creators spoke to heal, to help, to build. Now they speak to stay visible. The algorithm rewards outrage and calls it passion. Whole movements have become soundbites — cathartic, furious, perfectly optimized to trend. You share them, call it solidarity, feel the rush, and call the rush purpose. There’s no call to action, only a call to anger. Every feed a chorus of prophets with nothing left to prophesy.

We say it’s about connection, but it’s not. It’s about survival — linguistic Darwinism. Speak or disappear. Trend or rot. We’ve turned discourse into a demolition derby. Words crash until there’s nothing left but fragments sharp enough to draw blood. Nobody means anything anymore; they just perform the shape of meaning until it sells. You’ve learned the rhythm by heart: outrage, applause, exhaustion, repeat. You call it awareness. It’s addiction with better lighting. We package sincerity, polish outrage, and run ad campaigns for our own identities. We call it expression, but it’s just marketing with trauma fonts. You’ve done it too — framed your honesty in palatable hues, softened the mess for engagement. It worked. That’s the problem.

You can feel it in the rhythm — the reflex to speak before thinking, to react before understanding. We call it conversation, but it’s really competition. Truth collapses somewhere in the middle, buried under hashtags and commentary about the lighting. Fear performs better than hope, and we’ve learned to curate accordingly. We didn’t just learn it — we rehearsed it. We trained our tongues to sell outrage because silence felt too much like guilt. Hope asks for work; fear asks only for attention. Despair becomes currency — packaged, sold, and refreshed hourly. Even healing has merch now — grief with a promo code. Redemption drops every Friday. By the time your empathy ships, the next outrage is already on preorder. And the cycle keeps spinning, louder than any attempt to actually change.

Everyone wants to confess now — not to heal, but to trend. Vulnerability has an upload schedule. Pain has SEO. We bleed in bullet points and call it transparency. You post your pain before you process it, then watch the metrics like a priest counting confessions. We weaponize our own wounds for engagement, and then wonder why we feel emptier after every post. The truth isn’t lost; it’s drowned in sincerity so performative it forgets to feel. The mouths keep moving, and no one remembers what silence was supposed to mean.

Every opinion is a war declaration. Every disagreement a blood sport. We call it dialogue, but it’s really throat-singing for gods that no longer exist. The louder we shout about justice, the less we practice it. The louder we talk about empathy, the less we have. We talk until the meaning curdles — until words like “care” and “kindness” sound like corporate slogans. You hear it too — that plastic echo when you say ‘care’ and it no longer means anything. You keep saying it anyway. Everything’s been rinsed in irony, sanitized for monetization, stripped of texture, stripped of weight. Even our grief sounds like PR copy now. We’ve learned to speak through gritted teeth, terrified that honesty might end our careers. The internet doesn’t forgive; it feeds. And every apology becomes another performance, another proof of loyalty to the mob.

The worst part? We fucking know. We feel the rot every time we hit “post.” The hollowness between likes, the silence after the dopamine. Our voices turning synthetic. The truth glitching when we try to mean something. And I hate that I keep saying ‘we’ like it hides me in the crowd. Like if I’m clever enough about the sickness, I’m not infected too. And neither are you, right? That’s what you tell yourself while nodding at the screen, hoping the indictment skips your name.

But we keep talking anyway. Because if the noise stops, the loneliness comes back — and nobody can afford that. So we shout into the void, hoping the echo sounds like love. We build little altars out of attention and call it community. Sometimes it feels like standing on a stage made of mirrors — everyone talking, everyone watching, each reflection begging to be the last one standing. You cheer when someone trips — proof the spotlight’s still on you. You call it justice. It’s jealousy in drag. We build walls of words so high we can’t even hear the wind anymore. And when someone finally asks us what we believe, all we can do is repeat the last thing that got applause. Because if the noise stops, we’d have to listen — really listen — and hear how bad it’s gotten. We’d have to face what we’ve ignored, how complicit we’ve become. Silence makes the mirror visible, and most of us can’t stand what’s in it. So we scroll, we shout, we pretend that sound equals change. You know it doesn’t. But silence feels like surrender, and surrender doesn’t get likes.

Everyone’s a superhero now. Everyone’s a Captain Kirk.

I used to think conversation could save us — that if we just talked enough, someone would finally understand. But I was wrong. The more we talk, the less we listen. The more we explain, the less we feel. We’re not communicating; we’re cannibalizing language itself. Every word devoured, repurposed, hollowed out. “Care.” “Justice.” “Love.” “Truth.” All of them gutted and taxidermied for display. Meaning is a carcass we keep dressing up for the algorithm. And you scroll past the corpse, pretending it’s still breathing. You comment a heart. You move on.

The mouths keep moving because silence feels dangerous — too revealing, too sincere. You know that fear. The way quiet makes your chest ache. The way you reach for words just to drown the echo of your own thoughts. Stillness gets mistaken for irrelevance. No one taught us that listening is faith, or that meaning can survive without applause. We don’t know who we are when the performance stops. You’d find out, but that would mean being quiet long enough to meet yourself — and you don’t trust that voice anymore.

The feed hums like a factory line, each of us producing noise to stay seen. We mistake visibility for validation, validation for existence. Worth measured by volume, not substance. We drown in our echoes and call it culture. I’ve added to it. I’ve filled the air with words that sounded like meaning just to feel alive. Maybe that’s the rot — not that no one listens, but that even I forgot why I was speaking. You can hear it humming in you now — the compulsion to reply even to this. And when the world finally collapses under all this talking, we’ll still be arguing about whose mic was louder.

Maybe that’s the last confession left — that we were so desperate to be heard, we forgot how to understand. That truth stopped being something we sought and became something we sold. By the time we noticed, the silence we feared wasn’t coming — it was already here. You can almost hear it now, can’t you? The quiet between scrolls — heavy, human, waiting. It isn’t the end of meaning. It’s the start of accountability.

Under the noise.

Waiting.

Listening.