You shouldn’t talk about people.
The Prophet ﷺ said, “Do you know what backbiting is?” When the companions replied, “Allah and His Messenger know best,” he explained: “It is to mention about your brother something he would dislike.” Even if it’s true, it’s backbiting. If it’s false, it’s slander. Either way, it corrodes your heart. The tongue, he said will be the reason most people enter the Hellfire.
It’s not hard to see why. Talking is effortless. And today, the easiest thing to talk about is other people. Maybe that’s always been the case, but it’s hard to resist when our feeds are full of faces, signaling, gossip. Capturing attention is the name of the game, and attention is best captured by catering to the lowest human desires. Gossip is cheap, ever-present, and almost always framed as “concern,” “commentary,” or “content.”
But Ibn al-Qayyim said, “The heart is like a vessel; the tongue and limbs are ladles scooping from it.” If your days are full of noise, your speech will be too. If you surround yourself with what is bad for the heart, that’s what will pour out.
This is why the early Muslims were obsessed with time. Shaykh Abd al-Fattah Abu Ghuddah, in The Value of Time, writes: “Free time should be subjected to the rule of mind… spent for some purpose, whether for health… psychological pleasure such as reading, or spiritual nourishment such as night prayer, Qur’an, hadith, and supererogatory worship.” Note that this quote refers to free time, not work. Even in your breaks, you should be filling your heart with good.
And it’s not just about what you avoid—it’s about what you deliberately surround yourself with. Henrik Karlson notes: “You see the same pattern with top performers in many domains—researchers, programmers, painters. Often they spend a great deal of thought on how to structure their milieu: whom to interact with, and what work to study and learn from.” You can do the same for your character. Train for generosity by living among the generous. Build perspective by spending time with the dying. Your environment shapes your soul.
David Senra puts it clearly: “Reading biographies is one of the highest-value activities… you’re getting access to decades of experience in a few hours.” If you want to level up, spend time with people who’ve already done the hard things. Borrow their pain. Avoid their mistakes.
Or as Josef Pieper writes: “Tell me what you read and I will tell you what you are… books are for the life of the mind, and not the other way around.”
A full life isn’t just worship and work, but leisure and relationships that nourish. If you treat rest like an escape, you’ll come back weaker. But if you treat even rest as a form of cultivation, that’s the magic.
The only way to save yourself is to live a full life.