Deer in Headlines
By Gery Deer
Most of us spend our days performing. Not acting in the theatrical sense—no stage lights, no applause—but performing, nonetheless. We perform competence at work, patience in traffic, and happiness on social media. By the time evening rolls around, many of us deliver a full day’s worth of lines with little meaning.
Think about your own morning. You check email while eating breakfast. Are you tasting your coffee, or just swallowing it? That small moment may hold the difference between performing life and actually living it.
Performing is when you do something because the deadline is first thing tomorrow and someone expects a result. Presence is when you do something because you noticed something that refuses to leave you alone—like the barista who always draws a careful leaf in the foam even though almost nobody looks.
For most people, the gap is subtle. It’s the difference between doing the thing and the thing having you. You can move through an entire day answering emails, making small talk, nodding in meetings, checking boxes—and never actually be there.
Presence sneaks up on you differently. It’s the moment you stop mid-sentence because you heard a bird outside and realize you haven’t listened to anything but noise all week. It’s noticing the weight of a conversation instead of rehearsing your reply while the other person is still talking.
Social media has turned performance into a sickening staple. We curate our moods, polish our opinions, crop the messy edges out of real life until what we share is more like the reflection of ourselves in a funhouse mirror. The result is a strange pressure to appear more together, more informed, more inspired than we actually feel.
There is a place for performance. Teachers perform to hold the attention of their students. Leaders perform to steady a room. Writers, speakers, even columnists perform a little to shape chaos into something readable.
But performance was never meant to replace presence. When the show never ends, we start losing small human signals: the pause before someone tells the truth, the tired look behind a joke, the quiet satisfaction of finishing something that mattered.
The cost of such nonstop performance is exhaustion. Not the dramatic burnout people post about online, but the quieter fatigue that comes from always being slightly on stage. You measure your reactions, edit your sentences, and move through the day as if someone might be evaluating you.
Presence, by contrast, is disarmingly simple. It begins with that moment when you realize you’re just running the script. But you can change that.
Maybe slow down long enough to taste the coffee or look up when someone speaks instead of nodding while staring mindlessly phone. Maybe step outside and notice the weather or the graffiti on the bakery wall.
None of this will make you more impressive, build a personal brand or make a post go viral. What it might do is return you to your own life.
Presence can steady people. It lowers the noise enough to notice what actually needs your attention—a hard conversation, a good idea, a tired friend, a quiet, ordinary moment that would otherwise pass unnoticed.
And strangely, the more present you become, the less life feels like something you have to manage. Problems are still there, deadlines still exist, but being human was never supposed to be a full-time performance.
It was supposed to be lived in small attentive pieces: a conversation where you are fully engaged, a walk where you notice the season changing, a calm moment where your mind is not rehearsing tomorrow.
The challenge is not abandoning performance entirely. Sometimes the job requires it. Sometimes some of your day requires polish and composure.
The real trick is remembering to step off the stage when the moment passes. Look up from the script. Listen for the bird outside the window. Taste the coffee while it is still warm.
Because the goal was never to perform your way through life. The goal is to actually be there while it happens. And if you catch yourself mid-performance today, that pause might be the most honest moment of the day. Stay for it even if nothing else changes.
The Jamestown Comet 
Civil Discourse, communication, Conversation, Critical Thinking, debate, Deer In Headlines, Family Relationships, Gery Deer, Human Nature, opinion, Political Polarization, politics, Social Commentary, Understanding
Debate is not conversation
In Education, Opinion, Politics, psychology, Uncategorized on June 14, 2026 at 9:08 amDeer In Headlines
By Gery Deer
I have family members I can’t talk politics with. That’s not because they’re bad people, ignorant people, or people I don’t care about. They’re some of the smartest, hardest-working, most generous people I know. We’d help each other move furniture, fix a flat tire, or get through a family crisis without hesitation. But the moment politics enters the conversation, everything changes.
What makes it frustrating is that I’m usually not trying to change anyone’s mind. As a journalist, I’ve spent much of my career talking with people whose backgrounds, values, and beliefs differ from my own. I’ve interviewed politicians, activists, business owners, lobbyists, farmers, teachers, veterans, and everyday citizens from every imaginable perspective. My job was never to win an argument. It was to understand why people believed what they believed.
Unfortunately, that’s not always what happens around the dinner table anymore. Some people have become so hard-wired into their political identities that every discussion feels like a loyalty test. Questioning a policy suddenly becomes an attack on the tribe – or cult, depending on how you see it. Asking for clarification becomes immediate proof that you’re uninformed. Offering a different perspective becomes evidence that you’ve been misled. The conversation stops being about ideas and starts becoming about defending a team.
That’s the difference between a conversation and a debate. A conversation is an exploration. The goal is understanding. A debate is a competition. The goal is victory. Both have value in the right setting, but problems arise when people think they’re having one while participating in the other.
I’ve watched it happen countless times. Someone mentions a news story. Another person responds with an opinion. A third person offers a different interpretation. At first, everyone is simply exchanging thoughts. Then someone decides that understanding isn’t enough. Someone begins trying to prove another person wrong. The shift is subtle but unmistakable.
Questions disappear. Statements become sharper. Opinions are tossed in as facts, lobbed like verbal hand grenades. Listening becomes, well, nonexistent. Instead of learning something, people prepare rebuttals. Rather than consider another perspective, they look for weaknesses to exploit. The discussion has transformed from a conversation into a debate.
If no one recognizes what’s happening, the debate quickly deteriorates into an argument. That’s when voices rise, and interruptions begin. People assign motives rather than address ideas. You’ve probably heard the phrases before. “You only think that because…” or “You’re just saying that because…” Once those words enter the discussion, the original topic has pretty much vanished. The focus becomes defending pride, identity, and ego.
The irony is that arguments rarely – more like never – change minds but usually accomplish the opposite. The harder people push, the more firmly others cling to their existing beliefs. Nobody wants to feel cornered, embarrassed, or dismissed. Even when valid points are being made, they’re lost beneath the emotional weight of the conflict.
Some of the best conversations I’ve ever had ended with complete disagreement. Nobody switched sides. Nobody waved a white flag. Nobody declared victory. Yet both people walked away with a better understanding of how the other saw the world. That’s not failure. That’s success.
Understanding doesn’t require agreement. It doesn’t require compromise on deeply held principles. It simply requires that we recognize that intelligent people can reach different conclusions based on their experience. When we approach disagreement with curiosity instead of combativeness, we create opportunities to learn something new.
Communities depend on that ability. Families depend on it even more. If every disagreement becomes a contest, relationships eventually become casualties. People stop talking. Gatherings become tense. Entire subjects become off-limits because nobody trusts anyone else to listen.
The older I get, the less interested I am in winning debates. Winning is temporary. The satisfaction lasts about as long as the next disagreement. Understanding, however, has lasting value. It strengthens relationships, broadens perspectives, and creates opportunities for cooperation even when agreement remains impossible.
Disagreement is healthy. But what we need are fewer debates disguised as conversations. One builds bridges while the other draws battle lines. In the end, conversations create the possibility of resolution because people are working toward understanding. Debates create division because people are working toward victory. That’s a difference worth remembering.