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Am I the Only One Who Hates Small Talk?
Words are both precious and powerful. They can create; they can destroy. We can use them to deepen relationships or damage them. We can use them to comfort or wound. When we engage in small talk, we have the opportunity to do a great deal, or very little. We take for granted our gift to use words.
Let me start by saying I’m an introvert. Talking only interests me when I am with people I appreciate, find interesting or know personally. I can get on a roll if you ask me about a topic I’m especially interested in (and you seem genuinely interested in hearing from me), but otherwise I’d just as soon sit in solitary silence.
During my life, I’ve discovered that people like small talk far more than I do. They use it as a means to break the ice, to strike up a conversation, over usually unimportant or random topics. Sports, shopping, the price of anything—all these are topics that people indulge in, just to be connected. They can go on for hours (yawn) and I generally look for an escape route. I’ve received the message that deep, meaningful conversation is either a mystery in that environment or undesirable. Time to move on.
I have qualifiers to my perceptions of small talk. When I was my husband’s arm candy—er, partner at company functions, I grudgingly engaged in a lot of small talk. It was my job. Eventually, I realized that I was getting pretty good at it. I even discovered that some conversations went deeper, talking about values, religion, ideas. But most of the time we covered the basics: how many kids they had, their hobbies, the weather, where they lived—you get the picture. When my husband and I retired, I had even less incentive to engage in small talk and found that as my introversion deepened, I was primarily interested in conversation that I found enriching. I guess that makes me a snob.
Now my attitude may have something to do with my being an introvert. I don’t crave talking with people. I don’t mind it when I’m with a small group of acquaintances who enjoy being together; I just listen. Usually, I limit my time, though. I wonder if extroverts enjoy or at least tolerate small talk better than I do.
I do engage in small talk in one particular environment: as a hospice volunteer, especially if a patient has dementia. It is a challenge to find things to talk about when a patient often has limited memory of the recent past. Sometimes they remember old stories, and we explore them together. The most important thing for me to remember is to meet them where they are, and sometimes to find alternatives to conversation.
Don’t misunderstand—I do share small talk with close friends. Often, we start out with small talk, like a person who takes the time to turn on the heater for a while in a car in cold weather before leaving home. But at some point, we usually go deeper. And all my friends have a sense of humor! So we must laugh together; silliness is acceptable small talk.
I think a big part of my preoccupation with small talk is that I will be 70 years old this fall. I’ve done many things that have enriched my life, and have known some special people, but I’ve lived more years than I have ahead of me. I want the years ahead to be meaningful, to not be wasted in the trivial, to be fun or enriching or in deepening relationships. I hope that’s not too much to ask or expect of life.
How do you feel about small talk?
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Published in General
I am forever recommending Dale Carnegie’s classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. The book is so much better than the title suggests. That skill you describe is pretty much the heart of the book. It formed the basis for a youth ministry course I started (but never finished) a few decades ago. But it’s the same skill that came in so useful in news-gathering situations when I worked for a local TV news bureau.
Booze helps.
I can’t say that I hate small talk but I don’t love it either. I don’t tend to do much of it myself as I see little value in it, which is not to say no value at all. However, there are some folks who I’m glad to see restricting themselves to small talk since when they try to engage in any serious subject I can’t make sense of what they have to say. So I’d rather they just left it at small talk. I’m strange that way.
One of my most loved memories is a moment in our local grocery store. There was a fairly decrepit couple at the register, and I was in the line behind them. There was a teenage boy manning the register. The couple was working together to get the money out and bag the groceries. The boy was very patient. If I had been his mother, I would have been very proud of him–a fine gentleman in the making. :-) At any rate, the woman was looking in her handbag for something when the boy smiled and said with the utmost sincerity, “What time should I pick you up tonight to go dancing?” She looked at him and smiled, her eyes so bright. Her husband laughed. They were still chuckling as they left the store together, her arm on his.
The world would be a very bleak place without the teenage boys and their lighthearted banter. :-)
Well said. I’m also an introvert and I feel the same way about small talk.
It is an art form. My grandfather was a loyal fan of Carnegie’s book.
My grandfather had a big warm friendly smile, and he actually liked people and enjoyed getting to know them.
That’s the heart of the small talk should-I-or-shouldn’t-I question. If you enjoy getting to know people, if you’re in the right space and mood, somehow conversation comes easily.
Parents help their kids with this because the kids need to make friends. So parents and teachers and others try to model friend-making skills in how they interact with each other. The side benefit to the helping effort is that the parents make new friends too. :-) Kids have to have friends or they will suffer from terrible loneliness. It’s not something parents can force kids to do. All we can do is show them. The kids hear the grownups laughing, and having friends sounds like fun to them. So they get their courage up to try it too. :-)
I’ve never regretted being friendly with people and getting to know them.
The more I think about this question, the more I realize I like small talk and I like being around people who talk, even if it’s inane conversation at times. It’s a good skill to develop and one that will result in a life rich in experiences and relationships to the person who can become comfortable with it.
Small talk is the grease that keeps civilization moving, the priming the pump that lets relationships flourish. Being willing to make small talk is how you learn about connections with seeming strangers:
I had a friend in high school and college who knew how to immediately stop conversation at a party. He would look for a very talkative group and then enter the conversation by saying, “Once my brother spilled milk at the dinner table and my dad made him clean it up and he didn’t cry or anything.” There would follow dead silence for several seconds as those in the group would look at each other perplexed. I think he went into banking after college.
I was going to make a comment that the responders to this OP have been introverts and dislike small talk, but you blew it! (J/K)
Even though my wife is a school teacher, she is an introvert outside of school. But when some organization of a group is needed, she puts on her teacher hat.
Susan, great post and great comment above, though I don’t think that it’s a matter of picking better acquaintances.
I think that people’s unwillingness to engage is grounded on fear of judgment, rejection, and ridicule. No wonder. Jordan Peterson is pretty good and funny about this — he says something like: “If you tell someone what you’re really like, and they don’t run screaming from the room, there’s something wrong with them.” So we all wear masks much of the time.
When we open ourselves to serious conversation, we risk both rejection and ridicule. Perhaps we’re right about things, and this is unfair. Perhaps we’re wrong about things, but don’t really want to know, because the process of discovering that we are wrong seems too painful. It is certainly often true that people use conversation to jockey for status, which doesn’t help.
Small talk is essential social lubricant. My Bible study groups always start with 10-15 minutes of small talk, to put everyone at ease.
Hmm, I would have thought the immediate question from someone in the group would have been “Do you mean your father didn’t cry over spilt milk? Or did you mean your brother didn’t cry at being told to clean up his own mess?”
Four kids. They’ll tell you the stories are endless.
You could write yourself a small talk subroutine.
That’s a lovely point. We demonstrate engaging others in this way so the kids learn to engage, too!
I wonder why this worked so well. Perhaps it’s difficult to find a handle, or perhaps it just made people think they had a weirdo on their hands.
We used to hear talk about how we wouldn’t have so many wars if there was more mutual understanding. I don’t remember how or when I came to the conclusion if that if we understood each other better, the wars would be a lot more frequent and vicious.
Now that I think about it, maybe that’s what the internet has contributed to our political discourse: mutual understanding. Maybe that’s why the divide is now so fierce and bitter.
It could be–or not!
The reason for the nastiness is mainly due to the fact that people are often anonymous and feel they can say anything they wish, without constraints. I suppose to some degree, war gives fighters permission to do what they need to do, mostly without restraints.
This sounds like a good topic for a thread of its own.
Yeah, I think it’s best to emphasize the word “maybe,” because we’d have to think long and hard about just how to test such a statement.
I have always been an introvert and hated small talk. Now that I am older (72) and retired, I find myself engaging in small talk much more often. Even with people with which I don’t really have much of a relationship, such as checkout people. If they give me the perfunctory “have a nice day”, I always come back with something more like “Have a great week!”
This has led to meeting some interesting people. For instance, the “Chicken Lady”. I like to go to an independent liquor store in the next state (ours are run by the state), since I like the Indian entrepreneur who owns it. Through talking with him, I found out that even though he is an immigrant, both of his children have gone through medical school and are now professionals.
I noticed one day that the female clerk had a chicken shaped purse and commented on it. It winds up that she and several of her friends have matching purses. So I started calling her the “chicken lady”. One day I asked if I could take a picture of the purse to show my wife and she not only agreed, but got out the chick shaped coin purse that goes with it. Because of this ‘small talk’, even though pretty superficial, we have some sort of connection.
One time I was there, I was behind an older man who had a very complicated set of lottery ticket purchases. When he left, I commented that it was probably good for him to get his tickets from a clerk with a shirt which had “Lucky” embroidered on it. She replied that she wore that since she was a breast cancer survivor.
My earlier self would have never really met either one of them.
Perhaps that would explain why they looked perplexed.
I think you are on to something.
Personally, I think the idea of “mutual understanding” is much overrated. “Mutual respect” not so much. Therefore, I think it’s possible for me to respect you as a fellow human being, and to allow you the freedom and space to have your own set of ideas and values which, if they don’t diverge too terribly much from my own, I’m happy for you to have, and about which I feel no need to argue with you or upon which I feel no need to enforce my own point of view. I’m not all that interested in whether I “understand” every aspect of your thinking or not.
Now, if you are a bra-burning (or the male equivalent) lunatic, or if you are irrevocably committed to the destruction of all aspects of my way of life, then all bets are off, and look out. But my general inclination is to let people be, and to respect, as much as possible, the right of others to be goofy or occasionally wrong.
Frankly, I think we were a lot better off when it wasn’t possible for everyone to be everywhere, all the time. When that was the order of the day, discretion, modesty, and rational thought was more important than hashtags, group-think and crowd-sourcing.
I’m old enough to remember when JFK was assassinated. It took hours, almost a day, for that information to percolate around the world. Harvard University learned the news when my mother phoned my father (who was working for Henry Kissinger at the time), and told him. We were living at Kennedy Ground Zero (Brookline, Massachusetts) at the time.
In many ways, it was a better world, I’m starting to believe. Not so much group-think. Not so much lock-step. And I say that as someone who never thought it would come to that.
Susan, I suspected you were an introvert (not that that is a bad thing). Judging from my posts, what do you think I am, extro or intro?
I think, since you were a teacher, you’re schizophrenic–like me! I don’t think you have a great need to be with people, and you might engage to a degree when you are with them, but I’ll bet your preference is introvert. Especially with all the time you spend on crosswords! Am I superbly right or terribly wrong?!
Exactly right. There might be a name for you and me: outgoing introvert. Once I heard that phrase, I said to myself, “That’s me!”
Keep that in mind if we ever meet in person. Whatever I’m blathering at you only seems boring. The good stuff is coming, just gimme 30-40 more minutes. My ending joke about the duck will tie together all loose ends in the history of western civilization.
That’s awfully forward. We’ve just met!
Are you familiar with the MBTI (Meyers-Briggs)? This will probably get us off in a whole different direction, but I’m an ISTJ. The tricky part is that I have a bunch of exceptions, meaning I act differently than the traditional model. The introvert is a person that, in this model, processes ideas internally rather than with other people. I’ve found over the years, though, that there is a great benefit to processing some things with others, and I enjoy it. But not always.
Yeah, I can be that way, @archiecampbell! Thanks for making me smile when I’ve probably been over-serious about this topic. But what I love so much is that I’m learning so much! Who’da thunk??