“A tin can, when empty, babbles the loudest.”

Have you ever met someone with a tin can mouth?
Oh, I have.
And it’s exhausting.

They rattle in every room they enter,
throwing words around like coins in a jar—
hoping the noise will convince you it’s worth something.
But it’s not.
It’s just hollow metal screaming for attention.

The emptier the vessel,
the louder the sound.
It’s physics.
And it’s also human nature—
the loudest people are often the ones
with the least to say.

They mistake volume for wisdom,
mistake talking over people for having authority,
mistake constant noise for proving a point.
But the only point they prove is this:
they’re desperate for someone—anyone—
to confuse their clatter for clarity.

Proverbs 15:2 hits hard here:
“The tongue of the wise adorns knowledge,
but the mouth of the fool gushes folly.”
And gush it does—
endlessly, thoughtlessly,
like a faucet with a broken handle.

The thing is…
you can spot a tin can mouth quickly.
Their sentences sound rehearsed,
like they’ve been reciting them to a mirror for years.
They speak with the confidence of someone
who’s never been challenged
and the fragility of someone
who couldn’t survive it if they were.

Proverbs 17:28 gives them the cure they’ll never take:
“Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise;
when he closes his lips, he is deemed intelligent.”
But silence?
That’s something they fear.
Because silence exposes emptiness.
Silence would make people notice
there’s nothing beneath the shine of their noise.

So they keep talking.
And talking.
And talking.
They’ll interrupt you mid-thought,
argue points they don’t even understand,
twist your words until they’re unrecognizable.
They build arguments not to seek truth,
but to win—
and winning, to them,
isn’t about being right—
it’s about being the last one still making noise.

And when they finally walk away,
you’re left with that echo in your head—
the metallic, grating sound
of emptiness pretending to be full.

But here’s the savage truth:
When the clatter stops,
when their echo fades,
you realize that all along,
you weren’t talking to a person with depth.
You were talking to an empty can—
and kicking it was just giving it more noise.

So let them babble.
Let them be the loudest in the room.
Because at the end of the day,
the weight of wisdom will always outlast
the noise of the hollow.

And me?
I don’t argue with tin cans anymore.
I just stop kicking them.