Trivial pursuits
Go ahead, talk about the weather
The enlightened opinion of people who have quite a bit of their self- worth tied up in appearing enlightened is that small talk is a curse. Endless chattering about the weather or how you bothered to get somewhere, about how the last day was or how the next one might be, is an endurance trial. Maybe terminally small minds can find sustenance on such meagre topics, but good people, deep people, crave higher things, true knowledge, big talk.
The topic of hating small talk is almost always brought up in the midst of small talk, which is the conversational equivalent of pooping on the dining-room table while loudly insisting that it’s the end result of this lasagna anyway: fair enough, I guess, but I won’t be inviting you back any time soon.
The battle against small talk has escaped from the worst people at parties to places as varied as the top- rated Reddit thread and The New York Times’ Modern Love column, which have both recently expressed anguish at the process, and implored people to aim for big, or at very least medium, talk.
“Why can’t we ask each other profound questions right from the start?” asked Tim Boomer in the Times. “Replace mindless chatter about commuting times with a conversation about our weightiest beliefs and most potent fears? Questions that reveal who we are and where we want to go?”
Something, anything to get us away from this mindless breeziness and into the real questions of our day, like how impressed are you by people who have written a Modern Love column, exactly, and have you seen that recent study about the sexual prowess of Redditors?
It’s not an entirely unsympathetic position: I’m hard- pressed to think of conversations even with lifelong friends and family members that don’t start with a bit of chit- chat, certainly no one can live on small talk alone. There’s nothing worse than protracted relationships, like with co- workers or friends of friends, that end in no greater knowledge than their commute times or their stance on sunny days (for them!). Small talk is not an end goal, certainly, but neither is walking, and just because you’re hoping to actually get somewhere doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the view until you’re there.
The issue is that anti- smalltalkers seem to be under the impression that the point of small talk is the subject at hand, and there’s little to be learned from whether or not you “caught” the “big game” last night. Small talk is a lot more subtle than that, though: it is the beginning of a feeling-out process, an incremental but entirely necessary system of judgment that helps you determine if this is a person who is worth investing more significant time in. As with almost everything in life, it’s not so much the actual act as everything surrounding it that’s really valuable.
So it’s true I don’t get a lot about you by finding out that you forgot your umbrella yesterday and got soaked, but there’s plenty to learn from you about how you feel about that. Are you telling it as a funny anecdote, and thus may be the sort of happy-go-lucky type who would be up for whatever. Are you still visibly annoyed even a day after, and may be the kind of who dwells on small slights? I don’t know for sure, but I know how I might find out: a little more small talk.
For instance we might move on to small talk that is reasonably useful in and of itself, like where you grew up or what your living situation is or how you chose to spend the vast majority of your waking life, a. k. a. your job. All of this — especially when combined, through the magic of social interaction, with your attitudes and demeanour while discussing these things — manages to tell me what sort of person you might be, and how you might both react to and interact with bigger, trickier topics, like your most meaningful life experiences, or most intense challenges you face every day, or abortion rights and all the people you know who have had one.
To see the value in knowing who you’re dealing with before you embark on this kind of thing, you don’t have to look further than the Internet: shouting into a void where you know nothing of the values or even dispositions of your audience, even the benign stuff can pretty quickly descend into open questions about the development of your frontal lobe. Bigger topics are as likely as not to end in open threats or, worse, pun- related insults, which are things that are rather easily avoided when you already know who in the room gets flamey at the first sign of disagreement.
But the risk of stepping into a snakepit really only points to the true value of small talk: as a general shield against horrible people. The prissy thinkfluencers who abhor small talk generally like to denigrate it as some sort of horrid time-waster, but they have it exactly wrong. Its purpose is to save you time, to teach you who is actually worth getting into long conversations with; a few minutes’ chat about the weather can prevent hours of being dragged through interminable conversations about a trip to Machu Picchu or precisely where you stand on the latest federal budget.
The assumption of anti- smalltalkers is that we are all at all times yearning for deeper connection, that our chattering is a distraction or the product of our fear of connecting. As hard as it may be for the magisterial snowflakes to fathom, it’s actually just a matter of most people being, on balance, horrible, and needing a low- risk way to sift out the good ones. We do not avoid big topics for lack of imagination or drive; we guard our precious, private selves against access from interminable bores who think every second of conversation that does not grasp at the very edges of your universe is worse than drinking stale spit.
Our time on earth is precious. Why would we want to waste it on someone who can’t even figure out small talk?
‘Small talk is the beginning of a feeling-out process, an incremental but entirely necessary system of judgment’