The Work of Small Talk

How we fill the space between womb and tomb

Do the work

The man asks for your opinion but doesn't want it. He wants you to ask for his, then nod while he tells you. This isn't deception or trickery. It's the unwritten contract we all sign without reading.

Social life runs on these small politenesses. Someone asks about your day. You say "Oh, you know" or "It is what it is" and turn the question back. You both understand this dance. It's choreographed long before either of you showed up.

The phrases pile up like river stones, worn smooth by constant use. "Uh huh." "Sounds great." "You don't say." "Tell me what you think." These aren't meant to communicate. They're meant to fill space. They keep the silence at bay.

My old dentist spent years asking patients how they were feeling, knowing they'd lie and say "fine" or "okay" before describing why their rotten teeth hurt. The preliminary question wasn't medical — it was ceremonial. A handshake before the real business began.

We're all waiting our turn in conversations. Most people aren't good at listening. They're good at appearing to listen while rehearsing what they'll say next. The gap between speaking is just preparation time.

The clerk at the goon store doesn't care about your weekend plans when he asks. He's performing the role of friendly service worker while you gather your gooning supplies. You're performing the role of pleasant customer. Neither of you will remember the exchange five minutes later.

What would happen if we stopped? If someone asked "How are you?" and you answered truthfully about your nightmares or your child's struggle in school? The machinery of polite society would grind to a halt. We know this instinctively, which is why nobody does it.

A friend from college works in accounting. Every day for twenty years, he's ridden the same elevator with the same people. They've never discussed anything beyond rain or snow or weekend plans. Last year his wife died of cancer. He never mentioned it to his elevator companions. It would violate the terms of their arrangement.

Some learn this skill early. Others struggle with it their whole lives. One of my best friends never mastered it. At gatherings, he answers questions directly and honestly. When asked about politics, he gives his actual opinion rather than feeling for what the questioner wants to hear. People avoid him now. He's labeled "difficult" when his only crime is literal interpretation of social cues and demanding that answers be backed by reasons.

The masters of social interaction understand that most human communication isn't about exchanging information. It's about establishing comfort, like when you blink at a cat or don’t bare your teeth to an ape. It's about maintaining the illusion that we're connected to each other in meaningful ways.

I once watched two strangers at an airport bar during a three-hour delay. They spoke continuously, covering their families ("the ties that bind and gag"), jobs ("bosses always asking you to do more with less"), and the weather ("sure is changing nowadays"). Neither remembered the other's name. They weren't forming a friendship; they were passing time through the simulation of human connection.

What we really want is to hurry back to solitude, to do what we actually enjoy. For some living fossils like me, that's reading. For others, it's staring at screens while gooning/edging or painting miniatures or poopsocking the latest shitty blockbuster video game. The social world is just what we endure to get back to our private passions, lame though they might be.

A friend of the family taught high school English for decades. She made the required small talk in the teachers' lounge about administration policies and student behavior. Her colleagues thought they knew her. None knew she wrote bad poetry every night — bad poetry that she never showed anyone. Poetaster was her real life. The school was just where she earned her daily bread.

Everyone is doing this. The businessman nodding thoughtfully at your presentation isn't considering your proposal's merits. He's wondering if there's enough time to golf nine holes or visit the "Chinese massage" before dinner. Your careful words wash over him while he calculates drive times and sunset.

In grad school, I had a professor who spoke seven languages but liked to joke that he used the same phrases in all of them. "Interesting perspective." "I see your point." "That's worth considering." His vocabulary was vast, but his actual communication was limited to these professional placeholders.

Modern technology has given us new ways to perform these rituals. The text message "Sup?" rarely expects more than "Nm u?" The heart emoji on a photo isn't admiration — it's a digital head nod, acknowledgment without engagement.

The paradox is that these empty exchanges are necessary. Without them, we'd have no framework for the occasional moments of genuine connection that do occur. The small talk is the foundation upon which real talk sometimes happens.

I watch young couples on first dates, stringing together questions they don't care about, hoping against hope to get to something real. Most of the time, they don’t. If they’re lucky, they become couples who sit in restaurants saying nothing of consequence to each other for years.

At my uncle's funeral, coworkers approached us with identical phrases. "He's in a better place." "At least he didn't suffer." "Time heals all wounds." The words weren't comfort — they were conversational obligations fulfilled, boxes checked. It is what it is until it isn’t. If you can go, you can go today.

Yet sometimes, in rare moments, the performance drops. Someone asks "How are you?" and you tell them about your father's descent into mental illness. They stop rehearsing their response and actually listen, either because your retelling is entertaining or because there’s something substantial that touches them. For a brief moment, two humans connect without pretense.

But they're rare for a reason. The full weight of genuine human interaction is too heavy to bear constantly. We need the lightness of the most lightweight exchanges to handle our unbearable state of being — the small deceptions that grease the squeaky wheels of daily life. What is life but filling time and surviving as we make each long day's journey into night?

I once sat next to an elderly man on a cross-country flight. For three hours, we exchanged the usual pleasantries about destinations and weather. As we began our descent, he suddenly told me his wife of fifty years had left him the previous week. He was flying to live with his daughter. I asked why he hadn't mentioned this earlier. "What good would it do?" he said. "Happens to the best of us."

This isn't tragedy. It's just how humans operate. We fill the spaces between womb and tomb with words that mean little but serve much. The man asking for your opinion doesn't want it. But in asking, he's reaching out across the void of presumed incommensurability that separates all of us. That reaching, however imperfect, however performative, is what makes us human, all too human.

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