One morning while having breakfast with a colleague, we
had the following conversation...
Hi.
Hi.
How are you?
Good, you?
Good.
What did you get up to on the weekend?
Played soccer Saturday morning, caught up with some
friends for drinks that night. Sunday just binged
Netflix.
How was drinks?
It was good! What did you get up to?
Just chilled. Got a haircut, watched some movies.
Any plans this weekend?
...
At this point, I would prefer to eat in silence. The conversation was boring and robotic. Nothing came naturally — every pause was an awkward scramble to find something to say. For days, I replayed the conversation in my head, trying to understand why it was so bad. Eventually, I realised — it was small talk.
Small talk is surface-level chat that reveals little
about a person.
It is made up of statements and questions like:
How about this weather
How's your day going?
Where are you from?
What do you do for work?
Jumping from topic to topic, staying at a surface level
instead of going deep on one. Going deep means revealing
thoughts and feelings.
Take the question: What do you do for work?
I could
give a surface level answer:
I'm a software engineer.
Or I could
go deeper and reveal my interests and motivations behind it:
I'm a software engineer. As a kid I loved video games.
Eventually, I tried making one and became captivated by
the idea of making things and I've been doing it ever
since.
Why we hate it
We hate small talk because we crave connection. Conversation can create connection, small talk can't. That doesn't mean small talk should be avoided. We use it as an on-ramp to find something to go deep on. Problems arise however when we stick to small talk.