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I'm a complete failure at small talk, and I'm proactive enough to know when it's coming, a painful situation I usually succeed in avoiding.
At work, I go all the way out to the back of the building to take a smoke break, as I don't want to talk shop with my co-workers. I take my lunch breaks in the break room, but I've always got my face buried in a book!
I'm a "meat-loving" conversationalist! Give me some "meat" and I'll talk!
I'm a complete failure at small talk, and I'm proactive enough to know when it's coming, a painful situation I usually succeed in avoiding.
At work, I go all the way out to the back of the building to take a smoke break, as I don't want to talk shop with my co-workers. I take my lunch breaks in the break room, but I've always got my face buried in a book!
I'm a "meat-loving" conversationalist! Give me some "meat" and I'll talk!
You won't be able to have serious or substantive conversations with people who you never speak to about anything. You aren't forming those kinds of relationships. Simple, pleasant bits of conversation work as social lubricant, helping others to see you as a nice, normal person. They won't want to talk seriously to someone they regard as antisocial, pathologically shy or burdened with social anxiety.
You say you want conversational meat, but no one is ever going to serve a stranger the sorts of thoughts that they regard as private, or ideas they have, or questions about the universe. In other words, the world will not cater to you. No one will ever sit down across from you, look you in the eye and begin talking about a substantive thing. Because no one knows you!
You won't be able to have serious or substantive conversations with people who you never speak to about anything. You aren't forming those kinds of relationships. Simple, pleasant bits of conversation work as social lubricant, helping others to see you as a nice, normal person. They won't want to talk seriously to someone they regard as antisocial, pathologically shy or burdened with social anxiety.
You say you want conversational meat, but no one is ever going to serve a stranger the sorts of thoughts that they regard as private, or ideas they have, or questions about the universe. In other words, the world will not cater to you. No one will ever sit down across from you, look you in the eye and begin talking about a substantive thing. Because no one knows you!
Excellent insight and analysis, Silibran! If I may be so bold as to put what you said in a somewhat different way, I would say that we have to start small in order to progress to large. It's like a car accelerating from a stop - the car doesn't instantly reach 100 miles per hour; it picks up speed gradually and takes a certain amount of time to get to 100.
So it is with people and friendships, as you described so well. Sure, some people are stuck on superficial, i.e., their car is not capable of exceeding 30 miles per hour, but in order to get to know people who are not stuck there, superficial is still the starting point. I prefer deep too, and I dislike superficial, but not to a pathological extreme.
Someone we don't know who starts out very serious and deep right from word one is going to come across as very weird and is going to turn his listeners off.
It's a way to connect to other humans. It can be the way in to knowing someone better and moving towards something more "real," but sometimes it's just a stale filler for something not worth saying. To the contrary, having deep and serious conversations all the time would really be too much!
I can see making small talk to be polite; doable. I can see it leading to real friendships; doable. But I can't make myself sit for two-three hours a day with coworkers (interchangeable) and yack when I have no connection with them beyond both happening to work at the same place. It mystifies me what they think of to say to each other! It's like a lifeline they grab onto rather than be alone with themselves and their own thoughts for one minute; if it's not that, it's the phone.
Love to talk about something, but not nothing! What everyone did last night, what they ate, what they watched... Zzzz!
I can see making small talk to be polite; doable. I can see it leading to real friendships; doable. But I can't make myself sit for two-three hours a day with coworkers (interchangeable) and yack when I have no connection with them beyond both happening to work at the same place. It mystifies me what they think of to say to each other! It's like a lifeline they grab onto rather than be alone with themselves and their own thoughts for one minute; if it's not that, it's the phone.
Love to talk about something, but not nothing! What everyone did last night, what they ate, what they watched... Zzzz!
I agree that pointless conversations about personal matters in the workplace can be a real pain. And I hate having to hold up my end of a conversation that consists of complaints about someone's personal life. Especially when the complainer never takes action to change whatever it is he or she is complaining about. Agony!
But if I understand some of the posters correctly, they hate even saying "hello", or "how are you", or answering the same questions when asked. Some coworkers are on the some wavelength though, and they can have good conversations with themselves, even if others want nothing to do with their sharing sessions. But even with people who truly do communicate with each other well, there has to be preliminary social interaction. Or, people have to experience a work situation together: a crisis, being on a team, etc., where social interaction is necessary.
I do think some posters have pinpointed the issue of social anxiety. Some introverts might feel actual social anxiety about simple verbal exchanges with others. My point has always been that these simple social exchanges ease our ability to work among strangers. We don't have to love the people we say "hi" to. And we don't have to form lasting relationships in the workplace, although sometimes we do. But never exchanging friendly words with work colleagues appears, in our current culture, odd or antisocial. And the current culture is not going to change; so perhaps introverts need to bend a little.
I'm mostly a good listener. So I'll listen to a person instead of talking... sometimes.
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