I was talking to my son tonight.
I thought real talk.
I was working my way toward something. About life efforts. About what a person’s plain self is worth when they aren’t performing.
I used Dolly Parton as the example.
Not the rhinestones. Not the songs. Just her. The gift she gave people was being exactly who she was, out loud, without apology. That was the whole gift. She never had to add anything to it.
I was getting to that part.
Then he said, “Got a phone call coming in. Gotta go, thanks Dad. Love you. Bye.”
And he was gone.
Now here is the thing.
He meant it. I know he meant it.
That is not my complaint.
My complaint is that it did not hold him.
Three words that used to be an anchor, and they did not weigh enough to keep a man on the line for thirty more seconds.
There was a time when words were collateral.
You said a thing and it stood. Your word was the security on the deal. If it did not hold, that was a real failure with a real cost, and everybody around you knew it.
A handshake closed jobs. Nobody wrote it down.
I gave my word on a piece of work and I was bound to it. Not by paper. By the fact that I said it.
That is what a word used to be. A thing that cost something to say and held something after you said it.
Not anymore.
Now a word is packaging.
We tag meanings onto them until they carry whatever the speaker needs them to carry that day. Same word, brand new freight, no notice given.
Trust. Commitment. Transparency. Accountability.
Every one of those words gets said fifty times a day by people who have no intention of doing the thing the word describes. And nobody flinches. Nobody expects the word to be backed.
We have gotten used to words that mean nothing.
That is the cheap way out.
You say the word, you get credit for the thing, and you never have to do the thing.
Say “I care” and you have discharged the obligation to care.
Say “love you bye” and you have paid the toll on the way out the door.
Say “we take this seriously” and the matter is closed.
The word became a substitute for the conduct instead of a promise of it.
And here is what it costs.
A word that is cheap to say is cheap to dismiss.
If it takes nothing to give, it takes nothing to walk away from.
That is why “love you bye” does not hold anybody on a phone call. Not because the boy is cold. Because the words themselves have been drained. They cannot hold weight anymore. They are not built for it.
We spent a generation making language easy and now none of it will carry a load.
I am seventy-two years old.
I have watched this happen across my whole working life.
I came up in a world where a man’s word was the thing you could bank. I am ending up in a world where a man’s word is a formality he clears on his way to something else.
I am not asking anybody to go back. You cannot go back.
But I will tell you what I do about it.
I make words cost something again.
When I say a thing, I put proof behind it. Not assurance. Proof.
I do not say I did the work. I show what the work produced.
I do not say trust me. I hand over the thing that makes trust unnecessary.
That is the whole idea behind everything I build. Stated conduct that has to hold up. A word with a receipt attached.
Because a word that costs nothing can hold nothing.
And a word that costs something is the only kind worth saying.
My son said he loved me and hung up.
He meant it.
I just wish it still weighed enough to stay.
Post Library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
Contact: micvicfaust@gmail.com
This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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