How to avoid unnecessary arguments

If you try to mentally calculate, roughly, the time you've wasted in the last day-month-year alone with pointless discussions, you risk ending up in a labyrinth and becoming disheartened. Minutes, hours, which then become, according to the golden rule carved by Totò ("it's the sum that makes the total"), parts of life: all wasted time, and in the long run unsustainable for the damage it causes, whereas time remains one of our most precious resources which we should use sparingly.

Useless discussions are like a fan, They cover a range of behaviors that concern the private sphere, even the most intimate, and the public one, where the dogma in this case is represented by the ritual of the "televised debate" with which one should understand something more and instead risks becoming even more confused.

There are couples, husband and wife, cohabitants, lovers, of the same or opposite sex, who over time specialize in pointless arguments. "Darling, why do you insist on always asking me to tidy up my room?" And hence the endless discussion about who creates chaos in the house and who suffers it, a pointless debate since in this matter we are all perpetrators and victims. "Darling, is it possible that you always fall asleep in front of the television?" And hence another discussion that touches on the Grand Systems, namely how to coexist in diversity, and try to last a long time with reasonable chemistry as a couple, or why falling asleep in front of a screen, on which perhaps stupid things are circulating, is not a sign of disrespect, but a very banal and human symptom of tiredness.

A pointless discussion, in the private sphere, can escalate into intimate details, and in this case, a deluge of superfluous words and wasted time is as certain as sunshine on a summer's day. One of the two snores, and the other pays the price: the pointless discussion begins with the usual advice on how to stop snoring, and it continues endlessly, exploring the unknowns of science regarding why we snore and the certainties of good manners that should ensure we avoid inflicting life sentences on those who sleep next to us. The question: instead of descending into a tunnel of pointless discussion, isn't it much simpler to find a way and a space, if possible, to avoid sleeping next to each other all the time?

A question that expresses well the first and essential category to be applied to avoid useless discussions: the common senseIt's not something you study at Harvard, but since it's a basic subject, in terms of knowledge, and very easy to apply in everyday life, it's just a matter of making an effort not to waste it. Other categories to apply to avoid unnecessary (private) discussions are:

• Recognizing the diversity between people, Each one, one by one, as a resource and not a constraint. And perhaps joke about how we're not alike at all. Never, even when we seem that way.
• Feeling, like the notes of the most beloved music, the breath of life, in the life of a couple as in any human relationship, of lightness.
• Don't repeat the same topics like the liturgy of a mass., go and look forward and not back, even in discussions.
• Shorten the debate time, open and close it quickly, say by the end of the day.
• Thus, we avoid the poisonous after-effects of pointless discussions (another waste, as they poison, sometimes even irreparably, the quality of a relationship), which are part of the whole "let's talk about it" (uselessly) package.
• very trivially, respect others, don't accept the senseless and false idea that "in life everyone is made a certain way, and you can never change", but neither do you sit on the elementary school teacher's desk, with your finger pointed at someone else's neck, to teach them the verb "How do you live in the world?"
• Never cling to a conviction, and try not to feel like the incarnation of the Living Oracle when you speak. We all, absolutely all, spout a lot of nonsense throughout our banal existences. And no one is obliged to listen to it forever.
• Change the subject, on the fly, as soon as the shadow of useless discussion appears on the balcony of our daily lives.
• Let the other vent, If his desire for a pointless discussion is unstoppable, apply Dante's ancient rule of "pay no attention to them, but look and pass by." Irrelevant and useless things and words have no right to become indispensable.

If these antidotes to pointless arguments convince you, you can apply them, given their simplicity, to any human relationship, to any relationship between people. As parents and grandparents; as friends and co-workers; when you have to face... a meeting or if you find yourself in a family context with a very high risk of a head-on collision (Christmas rituals, for example, are a typical example of this situation).

And you can use the same mechanism also with respect to the useless discussions par excellence, those that concern public life (the well-known "public debate"), whose agora, now certified and acquired, it is the stage of the talk show. Here in the role of conductors there are excellent professionals (we don't say this out of corporate spirit, but because it is a truly complicated profession, which requires different talents), all grown up in the school of the inventor-master of the talk show in Italian style, Maurizio Costanzo, an absolute TV champion. Then there are the various musicians, with their respective instruments (on TV what counts are faces, expressions, shouts, gestures: everything that gets people listening), usually politicians with few ideas and many slogans to recite like poems in school, and journalists called upon to create the right context for the discussion which, possibly, must then erupt into a brawl (of different sizes: small, medium, large and extra large).

It is precisely thanks to the professionalism of the good host that not all the public discussions were repeated. talk shows, perpetually haunted by the share, are useless. In fact, in some cases they really help us understand different opinions and the very nature of the issue being discussed, as well as measuring the speaker's skills, at least their communication skills. But in many cases the total uselessness of the discussion on television is more than evident, if not for the orchestra and its members, certainly not for those who listen and participate passively. How can we avoid this waste of time (here, in addition to time, we also gamble with sleep in an era in which sleep well unfortunately it is not the rule, but the exception)? Once again the compass of common sense helps us to find a simple and immediate solution: turn off the television and conversation live with other betrayed viewers (or read a book and go to sleep), otherwise you can simply change the channel.

Read also:

• Doubt: the road to truth
• The many benefits of curiosity
• Arguing is almost never useful
• How to Make Conversation: 10 Helpful Tips