The art of Small Talk

Picture it. You’re sitting with two close friends, sharing a meal. Your years have progressed together, you’ve grown old together, you’ve seen other friends come and go, you’ve seen children grow up and forget, but through it all you few have survived together. So as you sit with them, sharing a meal together, what do you talk about? Is it how much these two have meant to you? Is it about the fears you share about you inevitable death, are you dealing with your own mortality? About the pride of loved ones? The sorrow of loss? The joy of a life led? Goodness no.
Why waste your precious few years on earth that you have left to be with friends this way on such base trivial matters. Most likely we will talk about the same things we practiced talking about all of our lives. Our ailments. What’s wrong with us, our lives, the world in general. There’s a truly depressing thought. What we talk about to day and tomorrow will be the same things we will talk about for the rest of our lives.
So if you’re excusing yourself by thoughts of you as a wizened elder someday, sharing the deep knowledge that you have acquired, think again. Most likely you’ll be having the same squabbles, the same discussions, the same everything that you trained yourself to talk about your whole life. In most instances you and I will die wondering when the “age of enlightenment” was supposed to fall upon us.

Unfortunately we spend the majority of our time in conversations complaining, and as our lives draw to a close it will be no different. The terms will change, the situations will be different, but the emotions will be the same. What are you getting removed, why, and how much is it going to cost. There is no real age of enlightenment for us, but we can’t blame older folks for talking the way they do. In a lot of ways they are simply reciting what they spent a lifetime practicing. Small talk.

But we, that is every generation, are professionals at small talk. We ask questions that have no meaning or worth, and we readily accept the same in reply. “How are you,” has lost nearly every ounce of meaning in our world. For the most part in the simplest of conversations say between you and the doorman we are caught up entirely in the familiar meter:

How are you

Oh, fine, and you.

Fine, thanks. See you.

See you later.

It looks ridiculous when you write it all out lie that doesn’t it? But the fact is that is how we talk to people, people we could very well, every day of our lives.

The truth of it is that we don’t even know how to ask each other about the other’s true and honest well being anymore. And as for those few people who do try to go the extra mile are seen are freaks because they are too “spunky” and those who refuse to play our clever little banter games are see as cold and rude because they don’t respond with our classically expected responses.

So in fact we have trained ourselves not to want anything else but the cool sobriety of “small talk.” And after a while we forgo that there was ever a time that existed in which we actually cared about conversation and the meaning behind words we spoke. Of course I suppose that not every person in our societies today could have possibly forgotten those times all together. There are those people who still genuinely care, regardless of what we as a society have taught them. These people actually want us to respond to the questions they ask, who want to hear what we have to say as individuals, who actually care about those taboo ideals like heart and spirit. We label them as optimists, dreamers, fools, et cetera. . . We make it our soul mission to seek these people out and break their spirits if it is at all within our power. Secretly we are jealous that they posses the ability that so many of us blindly allowed ourselves to loose. It makes us angry to realize that they constantly are reminding us that there is a better way to approach people. As just that instead of objects that feed us prerecorded responses. I wonder why Furbees were so popular.

Of course I would hate to make generalizations, however (actually, I make that statement solely out of courtesy) the worst of it seems to be concentrated in our cities. Actually that’s not quite right. The epidemic is concentrated in the cities, but it is not the fault of those people who actually live in the city. It is the fault of the people who work there and then retire to the suburbs.

Ah yes, Suburbia, the American Dream. Each family’s “Little Piece of Heaven.” The dog, the wife, the children – almost as neatly placed as the rows of homes up and down the block. Though, lets not get off topic here and start off on the insidious construction of the American suburban home; it’s not the construction of the homes that is really the problem, but, rather, the people that reside within them. The people that have raised themselves there. There is some relationship between the cities and their suburban leeches that goes beyond economics.

Either one on their own would not breed cold arrogance and ignorance so well as the two do together.

As I said before the problem really isn’t with the people that actually live in the cities. Within cities there are “small towns” that keep the city as a whole alive. In any city it happens, the city becomes simply too large to sustain any kind of social group as a whole, so the entire thing breaks down into sections, which in some cases can become almost exactly like small towns, with all of the social attitudes that go with that. In some cases you will have people living in one section of a city who have never really ventured out to other parts of the same city. Though we all say how horrible it is when we hear that the old woman in the small southern mountain town has never seen beyond 30 miles of her home, when there are women and men in cities who could say very much the same thing. I wonder why that is? Each community would generally consist of 3000-4000 people. by this breakdown though I am not referring to gangs though even they are a part of that small town environment. The fact is that every town has gangs of teenagers, it’s a part of how youths in that age range find their place in the world and within themselves.

I have a friend who was in lament over the fact that I had decided not to spend the larger portion of my adult life in the city. Now originally we were both from small towns in what you might call the mid-west, which were for the most part semi-rural areas. By that I mean that within 20 minutes you could be in a mall or a national forest. However, for him, in order to “progress” into the next stage of life it was required that he go to a city. It was like he was upgrading.

The things that make it comfortable for us to keep this façade of small talk going however are ‘false walls.’ We create them out of our interests, our locals, our features. It becomes a real game we play, City vs. Country, Rock vs. Classical, Black vs. White, Posh vs. Poor. The keep us comfortably surrounded and cut off in the face of the most important and taxing times in our lives (this is why people explode into tears at funerals—it take someone dying to finally put a chink in their walls). The Art of Smalltalk allows us to reside in that comfort indefinitely. Never reaching into someone else’s box to offer a moment’s worth of real comfort, or letting someone see the reality of what we feel.

I was in a staff meeting in which I confessed to the group a great sadness that had become part of my home life. I had been taking Fridays off for about four weeks and this was the reason behind it. I was spending more time with a close member of the family who needed to know that I cared for him still. During my speech I was obviously upset and yet after I finished one of the staff, instead of offering any words of comfort tried to lighten things by telling a joke. The whole staff got a good chuckle obviously relieved that the mood had been shifted and the woman probably got points for being someone who “takes control of the situation.” I sat there, trying to smile to save face, but incredulous on the inside. Not one single person at that meeting acknowledged that I, someone with whom they had been working with for months, was troubled and in pain. Instead they hid behind the comfort that levity brought them. A wall of humor. Or small talk.

Small talk is for small minds. Now I’m not saying that there isn’t a time for asking about the weather, or the latest game, but there is a reason that we call it SMALL talk. It takes no mental skill, no wit, no emotional commitment, no effort. You put so very little into communicating with someone like this that your reward for doing so is that the relationship and the conversation respond in equally small doses.

Picture this. A husband and wife are sitting across from each other. They’ve been married for years. They only talk to the waitress. They have come to dinner, they sit. They sip beer. They nibble chips, they don’t look at each other; they don’t smile. They fidget. He sucks at his teeth. Takes account of his wallet. They sit. Nibble more chips. They sip more beer; he folds and refolds the check. They sit in silence. Clean their molars. He looks at the check again. They never smile. She touches up her lipstick. They are ready to go. Talking about the weather. They leave. And I wonder why they bothered at all.