There Ain’t Nobody Listening

From Living It Daily I had a conversation not long ago that’s been sitting with me ever since. I won’t say who it was with, but I offered something I thought was pretty simple wisdom — the kind that comes from having lived a few decades and paid attention along the way. It didn’t land. Not even a little. And it wasn’t the first time. I’ve been chewing on why that keeps happening, and I think I finally landed on it. It’s not that people are foolish. It’s that so many have never been handed the history that would help them see where their “new” idea actually leads — because somebody already tried it, a generation or two ago, and it didn’t end well then either. Every generation is convinced its moment is exempt from the past. History says otherwise. History always says otherwise. That’s the real frustration underneath all of this — not the phones, not the scrolling, though that’s part of it too. It’s watching people build confidence on ideas that have never been tested against anything older than a headline from this morning. You know the picture I’m talking about. Heads down, thumbs moving, tuned into a 24-hour news cycle that doesn’t always tell us what’s really going on — and sometimes seems more interested in convincing us of a narrative than informing us of the truth. And here’s the part that troubles me most: once people are far enough into that cycle, they stop taking in anything that doesn’t already agree with them. They’ve made up their minds. They’ve decided they know enough. They stand on a path you can see the end of — because maybe you’ve walked it, or watched someone else walk it — and when you try to hand them what you’ve learned, they wave it off like it’s outdated. Irrelevant. Something an old mind wouldn’t understand. This is actually what led me to write a song a while back called “There Ain’t Nobody Listening.” I wrote it out of pure frustration, and it’s stuck with me ever since — maybe you’ll hear it someday. That’s a hard thing to sit with. Watching decay get accepted, even celebrated, without anybody stopping to ask why it feels so wrong. Watching truth get outvoted by volume. I won’t pretend that doesn’t wear on me some days. I’m 75 years old. I’ve lived long enough to have earned a little of what the old folks used to call wisdom — the kind that doesn’t come from a book or a headline, but from actually living through the consequences of things, good and bad, and paying attention along the way. There’s an old adage that says wisdom comes with age, and I believe it, because I’ve watched it prove true in my own life more times than I can count. But so much of what my generation was taught — the history, the hard lessons, the common sense that came from living through mistakes and learning from them — simply isn’t being passed on or picked up by the generations coming behind us. And that’s at the heart of my frustration, and I suspect a lot of folks my age, and some even half my age, feel exactly the same way. There’s another old adage that fits right alongside the first one: those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. My generation has been there and done that, more than once, and we don’t want to do it again — not for ourselves, and not for the people coming after us. But it’s a sad and heavy thing to know you’ve already walked a road, to see someone else heading straight for the same drop-off, and to have them wave you off like you don’t know what you’re talking about. So, the question I keep coming back to is this: do you keep speaking the truth from those many years of experience, trying to help others avoid repeating the failures of the past, whether they’re willing to listen or not? Or do you give up, and let them learn the hard way, the same way some of those failures were already learned once before? And underneath that question sits a harder one. Why won’t they listen? Are they really so distracted by their tablets and their cell phones, so steeped in the heavily biased influence of social media, that truth itself no longer carries any weight? If nobody’s listening anyway, will continuing to beat the drum of truth ever break through the deaf blindness of unwillingness? I don’t have a clean answer to that. I wish I did. But here’s where I’ve landed, and it’s the only place I know how to land: we keep speaking the truth anyway. Not because we expect to be heard today. Not because we think this article, or one more conversation, or one more attempt at wisdom is going to turn the tide by itself. We speak it because truth planted doesn’t need an audience to still be true. Seeds can lie dormant a long time — through seasons that look like nothing is growing at all — before they finally take root. And history tells us something else too: the pressure of propaganda always cracks eventually. It always has. When it does, the people still standing on solid ground will be the ones who kept telling the truth the whole time nobody seemed to be listening. So I’ll keep planting. And so should you… Anyway. Hey, this is Russ, and I’m still Living It Daily… See ya next time… All views expressed are strictly the opinion of the writer © September 08 , 2026 – all rights reserved Rusty Norman, Podcastnorm Dot Com, and LivingItDaily.com All audio productions by www.podcastnorm.com and Pod Cast Norm Productions All music from TwoBuckThemes from Mike Stewart unless otherwise stated