in defense of gossip

why do we mass-share strangers' private conversations

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About two months ago, I had brunch with a good friend I hadn't seen in person for over a year. It was a disgustingly hot day and so naturally I was in the mood to complain. And reader, I did. We entered into what I would describe a fugue state of shit-talking. By the time I got home a few hours later, I was like — who was she, the woman who took over my body while eating her little tofu scramble with toast? (Yes, I know — it is shockingly easy to make fun of me.) 

It happens sometimes, though. You overdo it on gossip and it ends up making you, the gossiper, regret everything you've ever said. For a while, you wonder what kind of person you’re becoming, that you’re saying such things about people you consider friends. You commit to doing better, to being kinder. And that should be enough — a bit of Raskolnikovian repentance, if Dostoevsky had been writing about girlies who brunched in the Upper East Side and were guilty of gossip instead of murder. 

But then, I remembered the two women who had been sitting at the table next to ours, and I am not joking that for days afterwards I kept fearing the worst — that they had taken enough mental notes of our conversation to record a little TikTok about the strangers they sat next to at brunch who apparently hated everyone they had ever met. 

And the thing is, I don't want to be a glutton for gossip — there is a point where engaging in it does make me feel physically ill (see above). But the idea that we now have to display a sort of performative niceness — or worse, blandness — just in case there's a bored, boring girlie hovering about waiting to make content out of a stranger's personal low-stakes drama? It is driving me insane. 

Luckily, our brunch neighbors spared us that day, so my regret was all that remained. My fear, however, was not unfounded. Over the last few months, there has been a noticeable rise in Gossip Police self-recruits. People who overhear a conversation they were decidedly not a part of and decide that it is their job, nay their duty, to expose the details — often, identifying ones! — of a private moment over which they lack any and all context to the entire Internet.