There are things you witness as a child, and you say to yourself, “Yup, I’m never doing that when I grow up.” For many, it was smoking or marriage. For me, however, it was these odd questions that adults would ask each other to fill in silences. “What’s new?” or “Ah, yes, work’s been busy” and of course, my personal favourite “The weather’s been great today, hasn’t it?” This, I discovered over time, is small talk. Or, to put it more accurately, polite conversations about useless information.
Fast forward a few years, and somehow, I do it now. Not with joy, not with enthusiasm, but with compliance. Small talk hasn’t gotten better. If anything, all it can be is unavoidable. At parties, in elevators, in group chats, it’s everywhere, and pretending to care about someone’s favourite colour now feels like a survival skill. What’s wild is that small talk is still exactly the same, pointless, and endlessly repetitive. But as a kid, I could hide behind a shrug or my father and label it as shyness. Now, I’m required to nod, smile, or drop a neutral comment about the weather or the traffic. The experience is still infuriating, but socially necessary.
If people really wanted to chit-chat that badly, you’d think the questions would be a little better at least, right? Instead, we keep recycling the same ones. These questions aren’t actually curious; they’re just there to keep things moving. They exist to be asked, answered, and immediately forgotten. What’s funny is that this feels very on purpose. At some point, we all agreed that getting specific is doing too much, asking something unexpected is awkward, and anything even slightly interesting might turn the conversation into a real one. So small talk sticks to the safest script possible. Nothing risky, nothing memorable, just enough talking to prove you tried. And so it keeps going. Nothing changes, no one complains, and the conversation moves on to the next equally forgettable one.