{"id":6167,"date":"2023-07-07T04:56:47","date_gmt":"2023-07-07T04:56:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sometimesraw.com\/?p=6167"},"modified":"2023-07-07T04:56:53","modified_gmt":"2023-07-07T04:56:53","slug":"small-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sometimesraw.com\/?p=6167","title":{"rendered":".Small Talk."},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I\u2019m afraid of small talk. Someone had to say it. \u201cHow\u2019s work?… It\u2019s been forever\u2026 This weather\u2026\u201d You\u2019ve heard it all before. The traumatic aeon held captive in the chair of a loquacious hairdresser; the slow motion car-crash that follows eye contact with a one-night-stand at the supermarket; family Christmas. I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve all survived similarly wince-inducing \u201cchatty\u201d ordeals, but my god – it\u2019s been touch and go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Luckily, a concerned colleague sent me some\u00a0Harvard research<\/a>\u00a0suggesting that my aversion to small talk might be due to asking the wrong questions. Apparently, instead of settling for trite, tried-and-tested classics like \u201cWhat do you do?\u201d I should opt for more searching openers \u2013 ones that explore contexts beyond the familiar arena of\u00a0pub chat fodder<\/a>. So in the spirit of adventure, I went cold turkey and cut small talk out of my life.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My first step was drawing up a list of small talk reflexes to be banished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. \u2018It\u2019s been forever’<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While this is often (unfortunately) not\u00a0literally\u00a0<\/em>true, you have no other option than to agree, and then invariably overcompensate by forming elaborate plans to hang out every day for the following decade. \u201cForever?\u201d It\u2019s probably been about three weeks, and we didn\u2019t have much to say to each other that time either.\u00a0<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. \u2018How\u2019s work?\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Surely work is the last thing anyone should be thinking or talking about in social small talk. That anyone would want to spend their fleeting leisure time fixating on the details of this labour is insane to me. Oh, but you\u2019re\u00a0passionate<\/em>\u00a0about management consultancy? Good for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. \u2018The weather\u2026\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A favoured staple of the English\u00a0conversational<\/a>\u00a0diet. Although meteorological observations are inoffensive, it’s hard to avoid conversation collapsing into a harrowing re-run of a French oral exam e.g. During le weekend, do you also play football with your friends in the park?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. \u2018How are you?\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The cheek, the nerve, the gall, the audacity\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0the aggressiveness. What a terrifyingly intimate question. It reliably triggers paroxysms of anxiety, non-committal non-verbal grunts, and a search for the closest fire escape. Everyone will be relieved if you just say, \u201cYeah, not too bad,\u201d which can reliably be interpreted as anywhere between euphoric and suicidal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. \u2018Been busy?\u201d \/ \u201cWhat time are you on till?\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s genuinely impossible to ask a taxi driver either of these questions without the following up with the other. And so begins 45 minutes of feigned sympathy with the cabbie\u2019s increasingly problematic political takes. You\u2019ll remember your headphones next time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As you might imagine, my list of banned phrases got quite long, and involved several shopping trips to the murky mind-palace of small talk misery\u2026 I shall spare you both the boredom and the second-hand trauma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My next challenge: Replace the forbidden small talk crutches, with the questions (somewhat questionably) scientifically assessed to make me \u201cbetter liked by conversation partners\u201d. Yipee. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\u00a0Harvard Business Review<\/em>\u00a0kindly provided several examples from a psychologist to get the ball rolling. Unbound, I was finally emerging from Plato\u2019s cave of small talk superficiality, and striding straight to work to test my new lines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. \u2018What excites you right now?\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Not a great start. Maybe it was in my delivery. Maybe the wink was a bad idea. The wink was definitely a bad idea. Attempting this one again and receiving a confused answer realted to the weather – mission aborted. But according to the Harvard shrink, this question “gives others the ability to give with a work-related answer, or talk about their kids, or their new boat, or basically anything that excites them”. As very few of my friends have kids, none own boats and only a couple would admit they have ever been excited, I started to suspect that this study might not have been road teted in a pub. \u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. \u2018What are you looking forward to?\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Invariably this resulted in my conversation partner asking whether they were looking especially sad. \u201cNo, you don\u2019t look sad, I just want to know what you\u2019re looking forward to.\u201d This wasn\u2019t a great hit either \u2013 it gives slightly unhinged \u201cI Can Save You\u201d Energy, apparently. I tried to explain that they could just tell me about their weekend plans, but the damage was already done. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. \u2018Where did you grow up?\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Ask this anyone under 23 and they will respond blankly that they grew up \u201cat home, I guess\u201d. Ask this anyone over 23 and they think you are trying to commit credit card fraud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. \u2018Is there a charitable cause you support?\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Jesus wept. This was met by widespread suspicion that I was about to shake them down for a donation of some sort. The more I protested I just wanted to know if they supported a charity, the less they believed me. Someone asked me if I was a Quaker, prompting a performatively longer coughing period. *cough cough<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. \u2018Who is your favourite superhero?\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This one went down as well as you might\u2019ve imagined: like a pint of warm phlegm. However, there was one American who genuinely opened up to this \u2013 cue a 15-minute conspiracy theory about a comic book creator called Jamie Hewlett who is secretly Banksy. Unfortunately, I suspect that a positive response from an American could be achieved with any of the questions on this list, limiting their use as data points in this particular sociological study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Disheartened and having exhausted the psychologist\u2019s suggestions, I started to wonder what the alternative to \u201csmall talk\u201d actually looks like. Perhaps there are only two types of talk that\u00a0can\u2019t\u00a0<\/em>be deemed \u201csmall\u201d: the emotionally draining and the pseudo-intellectual intolerable. On the former, there\u2019s a time and a place for a deep chat about your feelings and spiritual wellbeing, but most of the time it feels toe-curlingly self-indulgent and is best saved for dogs, death-beds or paid professionals.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then there\u2019s the other sort of \u201cdeep\u201d conversation about the grand metaphysical themes of existence. (The horror, the horror.) A chat that\u2019s likely to yield zero answers, but comes with a non-zero risk of inflicting paralysing existential boredom on both participants. Anyone who\u2019s met\u00a0that\u00a0<\/em>person at a party knows both of these \u201cdeep\u201d options are quantumly worse than surface-level chats about the weather, football or literally anything else.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, my all time favorites are: ‘What are you reading?’ ‘Who is your favorite author?’ or ‘Which books can I find in your bookshelves?’<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It appears I was too quick to judge small talk. Perhaps with my favorite questions, there\u2019s a certain beauty in the preconscious verbal ping-pong that happens with these questions. People usually read. People care about books. And everyone else cares about the weather, and it changes all the time. In a nutshell, small talk is there for a reason \u2013 it has conventions, and conventions can be followed competently. Sure, small talk is cheap, but aren\u2019t we all? And having endured this lengthy written testimony to the foolishness of deep talk, perhaps you too are convinced that small talk is the only talk worth talking. So, what are you reading? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m afraid of small talk. Someone had to say it. \u201cHow\u2019s work?… It\u2019s been forever\u2026 This weather\u2026\u201d You\u2019ve heard it all before. The traumatic aeon held captive in the chair of a loquacious hairdresser; the slow motion car-crash that follows eye contact with a one-night-stand at the supermarket; family Christmas. I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve all survived … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “.Small Talk.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_ml_titleColor":"#000000","_ml_titleFont":"Roboto","_ml_titleFontSize":1.136,"_ml_titleFontWeight":"400","_ml_titleLineHeight":1.3,"_ml_metaColor":"#708090","_ml_metaFont":"Montserrat","_ml_metaFontSize":0.6785,"_ml_metaFontWeight":"400","_ml_metaLineHeight":0.92,"_ml_bodyColor":"#a9a9a9","_ml_bodyFont":"Open Sans","_ml_bodyFontSize":0.85,"_ml_bodyFontWeight":"400","_ml_bodyLineHeight":1.2,"_ml_wooPriceColor":"#666","_ml_wooPriceFont":"Open Sans","_ml_wooPriceFontSize":0.9,"_ml_wooPriceFontWeight":"400","_ml_wooPriceLineHeight":1.27,"_ml_headingColor":"#000","_ml_headingFont":"Merriweather","_ml_headingFontSize":2.02,"_ml_headingFontWeight":"700","_ml_headingLineHeight":1.47,"_mlglobal_userfontcolors":{"headingColorUser":[],"titleColorUser":[],"metaColorUser":[],"bodyColorUser":[],"wooPriceColorUser":[]},"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-minimalism-lifestyle"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t