The Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin

In “The Autobiography”, by Benjamin Franklin, he list thirteen of his virtues and describes how he tries to be the “perfect” man. Throughout the story he finds out it’s a lot harder than he thinks, and realizes it cant be achieved. Everyday people strive to succeed perfection but in all honesty no one is perfect. We each have something we excel in or something we don’t no matter if we want to admit it or not.

One of my daily struggles is Franklin’s second virtue. Silence. It states “speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation”. There is a lot of different ways to interpret this. The main concept I think of is if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say it at all. When people say things I don’t agree with I struggle to say nice things back to them. No matter how hard I try something always comes out the wrong way or I say the wrong thing. I feel like sometimes I cant even control myself from saying negative things. This could also come from the fact that I’m very open-minded and not timid. I’m also a very friendly person and try to make conversation with whoever I meet. I feel like silence is sometimes rude and makes other people feel like your unapproachable.

Now with the social networks like Facebook and Twitter its much easier to update what your doing, where your doing it and who your with. I myself cant even hold a conversation without checking my phone for meaningless status updates or tweets. I’m sure people really don’t care if “I’m going to the dentist” or about any other pointless updates. I don’t think it benefits anyone to know what I’m doing on Facebook when all they need to do is call me. Although I know I also don’t follow Franklin’s virtue with all

these new social networks.

To add to my struggle with silence is the fact that I’m not a big fan of texting. I would