The lost art of small talk
You know what’s more boring than engaging in small talk? People who refuse to do it
TWO MONTHS ago, I started a new job – which regularly tops the list of “most stressful things you can do”, alongside moving house, breaking up with a partner or attempting to master an Excel Spreadsheet (something I must also do in this new role of mine). Before starting, I was appropriately nervous, with much of my concern stemming from a fear of the unknown. Will I be able to do the job? Am I an enormous fraud? Is it frowned upon to eat tinned tuna as a desk snack?
According to a friend, this fretting was wasted energy (“You’re a fraud, I’m a fraud, everyone’s a fraud!”), and there was only one thing I should actually be worried about. “Making small talk.”
This was an unsurprising update, given that this same friend is obsessed with limiting the possibility of being asked by a stranger how his day is going. Every morning, he orders his coffee from the bus so he can silently pick it up. Every week, he gets the groceries delivered outside his door. If there is an app that can replace an interaction, he has downloaded it.
His reasoning about my big small-talk problem was that the workplace is one of the few environments we’ve yet to phase out the need for boring chit-chat, and being new means being subjected to endless Hey-how-are-you?-Yeah-good-thanks conversations. In his words, “a waste of time to be avoided at all costs”.
As far as hot takes go, “small talk is boring” is hardly groundbreaking. Way back in 1923, Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski published his essay, The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages, one of the first academic analyses of small talk as a social construct. In it, Malinowski argued that the ritual of small talk “does not serve any purpose of communicating ideas” but instead is just “purposeless accounts of irrelevant happenings”.
The difference is that, back then, chatter was an unavoidable part of the social contract. Malinowski couldn’t kill time sending funny reels to his anthropologist group chat while waiting for the cobbler to finish fixing his boots (I assume this is what people did in the ’20s?), and so he was, presumably, forced to engage.
Nowadays, the rise of social media, fuelled by the digital revolution, has conditioned us to believe that we must never tolerate boredom, mundanity or even the slightest inconvenience.
It figures that the TikTok generation are the worst offenders in this regard, with a US study finding that about 89 per cent of Gen Zers are likely to check their phones to avoid launching into small talk.
Not that other demographics are much better. Nowhere is this more obvious than in my local park, a place where I spend far too much time but barely utter a word. While my kid is off talking to literally anyone who will listen (if we need tips on small talk, just ask a toddler), the crowd is a blur of Millennial parents and Baby Boomer grandparents glued to their screens.
And in a way, I get it. Why bother exchanging pleasantries with me, a stranger, about the weather when you can just check the forecast on your phone, then move on to scrolling?
And therein lies the great irony of our time. At its base level, social media is exactly what Malinowski described a century ago – purposeless accounts of irrelevant happenings – and yet, we lap it up en masse.
Who amongst us hasn’t found themselves enthusiastically watching the Instagram story of a third-hand acquaintance – “Oh wow, they’re doing a renovation!” – totally aware that if you saw them in real life, you’d rather remove your own eyes than hear about their splashback options.
From where I’m sitting, the biggest issue with small talk is perception and (for once), science is on my side.
A recent study by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology of 1800 people across three countries (Singapore, the US and France) found that when people were asked to discuss ‘boring’ topics, including the stock market and vegan diets, the majority found the conversations more interesting than expected. Basically, everyone expected the worst and was delighted when a five-minute chat about plant-based pasta turned out to be totally tolerable.
Accepting that small talk is just as boring as all the other boring things we endure is the first step to reclaiming this lost art. Small talk is not an invitation to engage in deep conversation or ideological debate; it is simply a low-stakes gamble that says, I am willing to be briefly unremarkable if it means we both feel a little less like strangers.
For what it’s worth, two months into my new role and things are looking up, thanks to the smallest of small talk, recently deployed in the work kitchen. “Is that Sirena tuna?” I asked the guy next to me, quite clearly holding a can of Sirena tuna. He agreed that it was, and I revealed my own identical can, leading to a long, pointless and perfectly satisfying conversation about the hierarchy of tinned tuna.
Small talk isn’t dead, my friends. It’s just waiting for someone brave enough to be a little bit boring.
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