I welcome this:
Scientists are developing an "emotion sensor" to show if someone is finding your conversation interesting or not.
I don't know what it is, but forty-somethings seem to have a large percentage of people (usually men) that ramble and ramble, repeating the same thing over and over, and turning 15-second points into four-minute monodrools.
There sems to be something about these forty-somethings' mentality that invites this, almost as if they're so convinced of their own brilliance that everything that pours from their mouths is worth saying, no matter how inane or redundant.
In a different context, I considered this phenomenon and came up with the following explanation:
It seems that men at the beginning years of middle age (mid-thirties to mid forties) have strong positions on everything. It doesn't matter what it is, they're dogmatic about it. I'm not sure I've encountered such adamancy–especially such weakly-considered adamancy–in any other age group. This group never stops to consider that the topics they're addressing are layered and that they haven't even scratched the surface of them. But they're latched onto a position.
I think I know why this happens. As young students (high school or college) the person is constantly confronted with people who know more–teachers and professors–and is kept in his place. As a young man, he is unsure of himself: constantly confronted with the possibility of failure and/or lots of bosses and/or no job experience to make himself marketable. Uncertainty is his lot.
But by the time he's hitting middle age, he has a lot going for him: job experience, a growing 401k, a nestegg of investments, a widdled-down home mortgage, respect in the community.
And he's getting cocky.
I don't know if I'm right about this, but the prevalance of bombastic and tiresome forty-somethings has put me on notice. Now that I'm forty myself, I try to make sure I inflict communicating pain only on readers of this blog.
