Small Talk Is King

I don’t want to talk about my feelings.

From the Library of Congress: Talking on porch of small store near Jeanerette, Louisiana, 1938

It was considered common knowledge that this particular lawyer was a mean lady.

I had gotten a job as a runner at her law firm due to what I thought was a pretty slick little scam: I Googled law firms near my apartment and then just walked into the nearest one. I confidently declared that a lawyer (who I named) had recommended me. This particular lawyer was the father of a friend of mine. He had made no such recommendation. I had not even spoken to him. I didn’t know they needed a runner. I wasn’t even certain they knew him.

It was a Friday afternoon, I remember. They invited me into the back room right then and there and asked me a few simple questions. I was hired on the spot. Now, I know lying is wrong. Or at least it is more wrong than it is cool, even when it’s very cool, as it was in this case. They even ended up hiring about six or seven of my friends. What can I say, I was a kid.

We all agreed that this one particular lawyer was a mean lady. She always seemed to have some issue with where we set down the folders or in what order we picked up her documents.

One day, my dad stopped by for lunch, probably on the way to a doctor’s appointment. We sat down at a sandwich place across the street. Sure enough, in comes mean lawyer. Before I have a chance to warn my dad about her irascible nature, I’m forced to make introductions.

To my great surprise, the woman is laughing and smiling and saying what a wonderful runner I am. The best they’ve ever had, she ventures. This is wholly news to me.

It’s just one of those things: Sometimes you realize, all at once, that someone very close to you is way better at something than you ever noticed. It dawned on me then that my dad is incredibly charming and quick on his feet, in that mid-century Southern man kind of way. I had bluffed to get the job, but totally failed to make an ally. He made a few simple and banal observations, which achieved more in a minute than I did in a year of working there.

Struck with a new curiosity, I asked him, “Dad, how do you do that?” “Do what?” he said. I explained the deal with the normally mean woman. He gave the question some bemused thought, in the way you might give some thought to a question like, “How are you speaking English?” or “How do you come to know how to ride that bike, sir?” He looked into the middle distance and, I guess, worked to put some propositions to his participation. Then he said, “Well, it’s easy. You just look them in the eye, and you just say whatever it was you were thinking the last time you looked in their eye. If you’ve never met them before, you just say whatever it is you’re thinking.”

To this day, that is some of the profoundest advice I’ve ever got. Still, in other ways, it’s deeply obvious. It’s not even particularly helpful, if you happen to be hopelessly out of the habit of looking people in the eye and making neutral observations. If you suddenly start, all of your observations are going to tend weird and off-putting. The problem is, you’re thinking all the wrong things. When you’re not properly socialized, you go increasingly crazy in the sorts of things you habitually think about.

Good socialization is something that happens naturally when they’re forced to be in proximity. It’s also something that atrophies in a vicious cycle. It’s hard to escape: once you’re prone to being weird, you naturally avoid the sort of practice it would require to stop being weird. Given all our opportunities for isolation, and very pleasurable isolation at that, with the phones and everything, more and more people are poorly socialized. To become anywhere near as natural as my dad, who was born in ‘46, we would need intense rehabilitation.

It’s a very interesting modern problem with many unexpected knock-on effects. For example, it seems to more deeply affect males. “The male loneliness epidemic,” they’ve named it. What most people don’t realize is that men are not reporting feeling more unhappiness from their isolation. In fact, most of the time it feels quite good to cancel plans and stay at home and play video games or whatever. Meanwhile, the measures of isolation, like how many close friends people have, or how often we invite people over for dinner, are all plummeting. Meanwhile, diseases of despair are sharply rising. Men are dying of loneliness that doesn’t hurt enough to fix.

Adam Mastroianni compared it to a vitamin C deficiency. For most of human evolutionary history, there was never a lack of vitamin C, so we never developed a mechanism for craving it when it was missing. When humans started sailing across the ocean eating beef and biscuits, they died of scurvy. They never for a moment craved the lemon that would have saved them from an agonizing death. Loneliness, in his view, is similar. We don’t have a mechanism for feeling the adequate amount of pain or thirst for socialization, because there’s never been a time in human history when isolation, and the wealth and technology to achieve it comfortably, have been this possible.

It’s not just a personal problem people are having. Networking events, work functions, and colleges have all been infected with the bad habits of generally poor socialization. Nobody knows how to engage in small talk. You see this sort of lurching and uncomfortable status probing. When people say, “Oh, I hate small talk,” I think what they normally mean is, “I hate that what do you do for a living? is everyone’s first question.” But that’s not really small talk.

Worse, the sort of people who claim to “hate small talk” are always trying to have big philosophical, or “deep,” conversations. Or, depending on their temperament, “vulnerable” emotional conversations. Trauma dumping, they call it. These people don’t understand, in a participatory manner, what real small talk is for. They’ve never quite felt it work. It’s so lost on them, when they watch other people do it, they assume that it’s just mindless chatter or a waste of time. But it achieves a lot of things at once, very little of which is communicated in the explicit words of the conversation. Very little of which, also, needs to ever be made explicit.

My wife and I have been going to acting class on Monday nights. We learn the Meisner technique. What it seeks to do is get you comfortable with nothing interesting happening. So, level one would be: I make one observation about you. Let’s say you’re wearing a blue shirt. I say so. You would repeat right back to me (even if I’m not wearing a blue shirt), “You’re wearing a blue shirt.” Then I would say again, “You’re wearing a blue shirt,” and you would say, “You’re wearing a blue shirt.” We bounce back and forth in a staccato rhythm like that, mostly just getting used to the idea that nothing interesting needs to happen. Once you are looking a person deep in the eye and making an observation, by the way, you’ll notice a surprisingly powerful urge to try to force something interesting to happen. Don’t.

Level two is you add in your personal perspective. “You have a nice smile.” “I have a nice smile.” Back and forth like that you go, making neutral observations about each other and affirming the observations received, still rejecting all pressure to make something interesting happen. Up we go through the levels thusly, each adding a new layer of something to do, a further distraction, until you finally cut out the repetitions and just do a normal scene.

An observation: the only way you can be a truly bad actor is by trying to be a good actor. It’s a paradox that needs to be relaxed away with banality. “Good acting” arises like a tide that has nothing to do with the will of either performer. You have only to make yourself extremely receptive to something authentic happening. Listen. Then ride that wave until it naturally dissipates. Rinse and repeat.

Another: Film and theatre are very unrealistic. In real life, almost everyone is a truly terrible listener. Oddly, when you think about it, everyone in movies is a world-class listener. The reason we venerate actors. They are extraordinary at a skill we can’t make explicit. They are what we wish people were more like, if only we had the courage to sit in the discomfort of nothing happening until something magically does.

I am reminded of my dad’s advice. When you’re speaking to someone, all you have to do is look them in the eye and say what you notice. People are absolutely gobsmacked by this behavior. People love being paid attention to. They’re so starved of this these days, even a barely conscious neutral observation tickles them to death. It cracks even the hardest people open, like it did with the lawyer lady.

I spent some time doing improv back in my LA days. There’s a similar rule in that: the easiest way to not be funny is to try to be funny. You’d be shocked by how much of a laugh you can get out of a simple grounded observation: “That’s weird, what you just said.” “Nice shirt.” The audience has no way of expressing what they see. So, by me saying out loud the things we all hope everyone else is seeing, it causes a natural release of pent up tension in the form of laughter.

That’s not to say that conversation always has to be staccato and banal. “Deep” people are always too worried that they won’t get to talk about what it all means, man. They don’t realize that small talk is always the best place to start on the way to the deepest conversations. And people have such low expectations these days, you can not be very good at this and people will still love it. You probably don’t have the chops to start somewhere more exciting, anyway. Talking about the weather is fine. Next time, talk about what you notice about the weather. Even more advanced, look the person in the eye and just say whatever it is you notice about them. Maybe they’re dressed for the weather, or maybe they wore something nice today. Emotions are more beautiful when they’re restrained.

My wife and I were sitting on the couch the other night, talking about texting people back. People who love “growth.” She blurted out, “I hate talking about personal growth. Text me about your crown molding or something.” I agree. Texting about your goals is like bad acting. It’s trying to make something interesting happen. It’s probing for status, too, or trying to excite or flatter the other person’s sense of status. The urge to convey the important people you’ve met, what you’re building, where you’re going to be in five years. None of it can be observed here, around you, now.

I would rather someone text me, “I saw a kid swing a baseball bat. He must have been four years old, but he had the most beautiful, fluid swing I’ve ever seen in my life.” Or, “I went to an event today, and 90% of the guys had the same kind of beard, and I never figured out why.” Or, “I saw two teenagers playing old school Game Boys on the bus today.”

It’s a simple skill that is difficult to rehabilitate. We desperately don’t want to seem “boring.” We don’t want to just be around. Like I said near the beginning, if you’re out of the habit, your natural observations are going to be self-conscious, too status-focused, and therefore a little bit off-putting. But as you practice it, your intuition comes online again. Suddenly, even you will be surprised by the things you say. People will laugh just because of the way you say what you see. Whatever occurs to you becomes magic. It’s a way of letting go of all the pre-planning and the subsequent anxiety, and just being content with it all being boring, if it is. That way, you’re always ready to ride a wave when it emerges.

The common self-help advice about this is also mostly terrible. It suggests that men should only be friends with people who celebrate their successes, or that their network is their net worth, or that they’re the average of the five people they spend the most time with. This is just celebrating the disease of being weird to be around and finding other people with the same disease. Or they tell us that we need therapy or to better express their negative feelings. No. We just need to be socialized better. We need to be normal and fun. We need to be useful and good to be around. Socio-political headwinds against young men or no, this is the only way forward for them. Go be friends with old ladies at the food pantry.

You don’t need better friends. You need to be a better friend. You don’t need to be around like-minded people. You need to notice whose minds you like.

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