I stopped blinking.
I know it might sound to you like I didn’t finish that thought, like maybe I meant to go on to say something along the lines of, “I stopped blinking to see how long I could go, but after a few seconds I succumbed to my natural human instinct and finally blinked,” but nope—that’s the whole sentence.
I stopped blinking.
I don’t need to blink anymore, and I don’t know why.
Of course, when you’re having a conversation with somebody, you can’t just stare at them without blinking, because they WILL think you’re a psychopath. Since blinking feels just as unnatural as maintaining unfazed eye contact, however, my solution is to casually look away every few seconds.
“Oh, that’s cool,” (*looks somewhere to the side, giving the appearance of being completely submerged in deep thought, but really using this an excuse to subtly break eye contact*) “and what do you think about that?” (*maintains eye contact during the response, but if the response lasts longer that 7 seconds, looks away again every 5 seconds “in deep thought”*) “Oh, I totally agree,” (*again, during this response, looks somewhere to the side every 5 seconds, seemingly staring off into the matrix while calculating all of the universe’s secrets*) “but what about this other thing?” (*repeats process as necessary until the engagement has been terminated*).
This establishes to all of my fellow conversationalists that I’m not a threat, despite my wide, highly-intimidating, unblinking peepers.
Until next time,
Michael J. Erickson, CEO & Co-Founder
