Hi there, how’re you? How’s it going? You alright? All good?
As any Briton knows, none of these questions is an inquiry into your emotional state, the material conditions of your life or your opinion on anything. Respond positively – “all good so far, touch wood” is nice – then move on to the purpose of the interaction: “I’m returning an Amazon package?”
I communicate for a living and am nearly always in front of a camera, microphone, keyboard or live audience. Great conversation is a supreme design to me, an exquisite dance of mutual pleasure practised by true proficients who make it seem effortless. And then there’s small talk, the Primark version for everyday wear. That’s all the chat around the edges, the bits of make-do and banter. Busy day so far? What’s the traffic like?
But make no mistake – this kind of conversation isn’t superfluous, it’s vital. In fact, the work day doesn’t flow without small talk. It’s team building, not forced conversation, and it should occur simultaneously with a necessary interaction, transaction or service, to ease the movement like linguistic synovial fluid.
Recent research backs me up. Across three countries (Singapore, the US and France) and 1,800 people, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology reported that people find value in everyday conversations they’d anticipated as being boring. So small talk is a social good with a bad reputation. We dread it, but it benefits us.
Small talk is not an invitation to engage in deep conversation, theoretical debate or soul exchange, but a hedge against them. It is supposed to be rote GCSE-level role play about universal topics on which everyone has the same opinion, by which I mean the weather, not death. You are meant to recycle phrases that are not interesting, without introducing novel information.
Through small talk, this week I learned that a recent football match was like watching kids in a playground (ie both amateurish and boring), that April weather is so variable you’re never sure what coat to wear, and that now the clocks have gone forward the evenings are noticeably brighter. Through small talk, you can be polite to the dry cleaner for one minute, three times a year, for decades, saying the same thing over and over, and you can both earn a reputation as pillars of the community, however true or not that might be.
I mean, don’t force your inane babble on the unimpressed staff at the 24-hour shop, like some sad woman whose eventual departure is trailed by pitying looks and the shop workers saying: “Poor thing. She must be lonely.” Be brief, sincere and bland. Don’t ask weird questions. I was once asked by a serial-killery waiter what exactly I planned to do for the rest of the day. And I was once trapped on a night bus in a traffic jam in the rain, having some doleful chat with the woman next to me when she said, with intent: “It’s a bit grim, isn’t it? A bit like my year.” I did not take the bait. I was also asked by a very intense girl at a gallery cafe which painting I liked best in the exhibition, and why. I froze, then whispered: “I like all paintings equally.”
If you avoid these pitfalls, you’ll do fine. Small talk isn’t boring; it’s a necessary staple. It’s not meaningless blather; it’s essential reinforcement with deeply embedded cultural meaning. It’s a bulwark against total social breakdown. The one thing that human beings do that distinguishes us from other mammals is use language to communicate, express ourselves and understand others. Has evolution done a U-turn? Just take one look down the length of a train carriage, crammed with inert, slack-faced blobs staring at their phones, seemingly unaware of each other’s existence.
How have we got a society – it’s not just young people, I’ve seen it in all generations – in which we no longer know how to talk to each other with decency, self-awareness and consideration? Through small talk, we patch and mend a world, word by word, that hasn’t been completely ripped apart by rage, paranoid mistrust, fear and loathing or numb resignation. That is what I’m getting at when I ask if you’ve had a chance to get out of the office and enjoy the sunshine at all.
