If you’ve taken your Philosophy requirement already, you know that people have asked some pretty challenging questions over the course of human existence, such as “Why are we here?”, “What happens after death?” or “Is there a God?” However, the hardest questions in the universe are not the ones generated in academia over thousands of years, but those spawned by the dreaded conversation category of “small talk”.
1. How are you? It seems like such a simple question, and yet it constantly trips us up. Suddenly, you must attempt to describe your exact emotional, physical, mental and spiritual state to another person. Of course, it’s impossible to go into that amount of depth, so often we settle for “fine, you?”, but does anyone feel just “fine?” What does “fine” mean? This small talk question is kind of the worst because we’ll never be satisfied with an answer suited for a 30 second conversation.
2. What did you do over the summer? This question has probably come up several times over the past couple of weeks, especially in syllabus week introductions (don’t get me started on those!!). But how does one condense their entire summer into a simple, compact “small talk appropriate” response? This is about three months’ worth of experiences we’re trying to convey!
Sometimes the question is (thankfully) more specific to your summer if the person knows you pretty well (How was your internship? Travel abroad? Vacation? Etc.). Yet, even these have their pitfalls. I often want to carefully select moments that I think the other person will find interesting, and other times I can’t think of anything to say other than “It was great!”
3. How was your week? Why is this question so impossible to answer? It shouldn’t be too hard to remember what you did that day or week, and yet I always seem to draw a blank, no matter how many times I am asked this question. My go to answer has become “busy”, but I have a lot of difficulty elaborating on that description.
However, there’s a TED Talk called “Pursuit of a Memorable Life” that may help us understand the difficulty of this question better. Speaker Dustin Garis claims that routine (such as weekly classes and extracurriculars) causes our brain to “blur” events together, thus preventing us from remembering specific days or weeks very well. This is to condense space for remembering more “important” things. It’s an interesting theory that might explain one of several small talk conundrums! But whether we understand why it’s impossible or not, small talk is still a daily challenge. Perhaps one day we will solve the enigma of small talk or do away with it completely, but until then, we can console ourselves by knowing small talk is a universal struggle.
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