Saw this elsewhere, thought it'd be a good to share here
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@sharkNserg when people rail against small talk I'm always left internally asking myself "so, what, like a psychopath or something?"
@PetrichorSquirrel it's fine to not like it and be bad at it and wish you didn't have to do it, honestly, I just wish it didn't so often turn into pathologizing people that *are* okay with it
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@janneke that's reasonable enough!
@sharkNserg
I was going to say, why don't they teach this sort of stuff in school or so, and then I wondered, how come typical folks somehow all know/learn such unwritten, amazingly silly, rules? -
Saw this elsewhere, thought it'd be a good to share here
Based on my replies, I get the feeling people on Fedi are more likely to feel attacked by this, so, please take my reassurance:
It is ok to not like small talk, it is okay to be bad at it, it is okay to wish you didn't get put into situations where you feel like you're forced into it
All this post is for is demystifying why others do it and why it's not bad or shallow that they do it
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@sharkNserg
I was going to say, why don't they teach this sort of stuff in school or so, and then I wondered, how come typical folks somehow all know/learn such unwritten, amazingly silly, rules?@janneke Honestly, if you asked people that are good at and like small talk why they do it, most of them aren't going to explain it like this post does, because it's probably not something they ever really thought about
And, I would say school *is* the place where a lot of this is learned; not formally or with lessons, but just as part of socialization and (hopefully) with teachers or other leadership that take an active interest in helping kids get along
Doesn't always work, of course, but...
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@Coffee@toot.cafe @sharkNserg@plush.city If the purpose of small talk is to make friendly noises, then meowing is also a form of small talk
@Stephanie This is precisely my point.
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@Bumblefish meowwww
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@Coffee @sharkNserg
Having an actual social interaction gives a lot more information to both parties. Any anti-social psycho can make cat noises.@ide Wait wait wait. Are you telling me those clickbaity articles I have been reading all my life -- claiming that 90% of NT communication is nonverbal+subtext and words barely matter -- are wrong?
Conversely, do you understand how much _subtext_ a single meow can hold?
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if you dislike small talk: this post isn't to convince you to like it
It's only to explain, if you have ever thought "small talk is so pointless and I don't understand why people do it", well, why they do it
Yeah, and even if you don't wanna do it yourself, knowing what the purpose of it is might inform what you do instead.
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@Stephanie This is precisely my point.
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Saw this elsewhere, thought it'd be a good to share here
@sharkNserg So funny (possibly) story, an old acquaintance of mine used to hame Strong Opinions about “small talk” that were in line with your comments - they are “polite noises” that we are set in our ways to both state and reply, and the *content* of the reply doesn’t matter, it’s that there *is* a reply that makes the other person feel seen and recognized and the lack of a response comes across as cold, caring, and inhuman, and likely is someone you would otherwise want to avoid.
To prove that the ‘response’ to small talk was itself irrelevant, he used to reply to canned small talk comments by *quacking*. Almost nobody ever mentioned it, they took the response - any response - as an acknowldgement.
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Saw this elsewhere, thought it'd be a good to share here
I like to make eye contact, yawn broadly and then walk away. This shows that we aren't threatening to each other!
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Saw this elsewhere, thought it'd be a good to share here
@sharkNserg I love this - it's really helpful to me because I also have terrible difficulty with small talk. This makes me think there's perhaps a point to it.
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Saw this elsewhere, thought it'd be a good to share here
@sharkNserg meow > "nice weather today"
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@ide Wait wait wait. Are you telling me those clickbaity articles I have been reading all my life -- claiming that 90% of NT communication is nonverbal+subtext and words barely matter -- are wrong?
Conversely, do you understand how much _subtext_ a single meow can hold?
@Coffee @ide @sharkNserg The words don't matter, just that you say them. The words will be interpreted as the listener wishes. They will do a basic scan over the words to see which ones you use & guess what you might mean from that. Apparently "nice weather today" means "let's be friends" & "so we can infer from this that there must be some imaginary number i which must be equal to the square root of negative one" means "I am extremely dangerous & going to hurt you, now you must make a threat display of your own to scare me away[1]".
[1] Hyperbole.
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@sharkNserg people who hate small talk freak me out
I do not know you why are you trying to talk about something so serious. It's very selfish and no one likes an edgelord.
Or even worse: if you refuse to talk to strangers your world will be very small and the antithesis of the community based world that needs to come into being.
@vapaad @sharkNserg Speaking for myself, but also a common experience among autistics: it took me a very long time to get a sense of what the average person considers to be "too serious for someone I just met".
It didn't help that it's pretty common for people to universalize their own conversational "weights"; so, for instance, the dictum "never talk about politics with someone you've just met," even construed narrowly to refer just to partisan electoral politics, is still a bad rule! I don't want to be friends with Trumpists, and using a vague "orange man bad"-level slogan as a feeler is also small talk. I recommend it.
Yet people advised me against that all the time, honestly believing they were being helpful, when they were really offloading their emotional baggage on me. It sucks if your own politics small talk made you unpopular, but that's either your problem, or theirs.
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@ozzelot meow!
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@arthfach @irina @sharkNserg In terms of general communication I agree, that neither has to be small, nor even talk, which is a specific form of exchange.
Even just nodding and smiling alone works better for some of us, as it's potentially perceived as an order of magnitude less pretentious.
Talking about disabilities also hints at misunderstanding the double empathy problem altogether I think, as both "sides" are perfectly fine by themselves - it's the interactions that aren't. -
@Coffee@toot.cafe @sharkNserg@plush.city If the purpose of small talk is to make friendly noises, then meowing is also a form of small talk
@Stephanie small babby kitty talk
@Coffee @sharkNserg -
Saw this elsewhere, thought it'd be a good to share here
@sharkNserg tech-oriented people might see it this way: your algorithm doesn't just immediately start dumping data, right? It checks "is the other party ready to receive, what bandwidth can they handle, which protocols do they support?"
I've had folks come up to me and immediately launch into a rant, and I'm thinking "hey! I'm in a grumpy mood, I don't have much time, another day I'd have been happy to hear you but this was impolite"
Small talk is meant to gauge availability and mood, before introducing potential topics for deeper conversation, with mutual consent.
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Saw this elsewhere, thought it'd be a good to share here
@sharkNserg I've known its purpose for ages and I still hate it.
