The Function of Small Talk
Like many people, I once resented small-talk - idle chats with others about trivial and obvious things. But its role in maintaining our sanity could be more important than you think.
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Here we go again
So we’re facing into the strictest of lockdowns, and it’s just been announced that we’re not allowed to visit each other’s houses. We’re not even allowed (legally? No-one knows) step into our neighbour’s or our friend’s garden.
You can practice anything, including being alone. And I’ve practiced it quite a bit. Which isn’t to say it won’t be difficult for me. One important thing to remember about personal well-being is that positive and negative thinking, and feeling and experience should be looked at as two separate scales.
It’s possible to feel strong feelings of both at once, or to feel neither at once. They are not always two sides of the same coin, though generally you would feel both at once. This has been a strange year, and many things have been accelerated, accentuated and otherwise placed in a pressure cooker and brought to the boil. So it shouldn’t be any surprise if you get out of bed thinking one thing and by lunchtime you feel like a completely different person.
And it’s going to be even more difficult now to know where you stand when you can’t even visit your friend or neighbour’s house. Because it’s human interaction that grounds us in who we are. Even the most emotionally self-sufficient people or introverted people need some form of human contact. And it’s not just about deep conversations, or even bonding with close friends. Don’t under-estimate the value of the small, daily interactions with your fellow people. On the street, in the supermarket, waiting in line.
“I don’t like small talk”
So-called ‘small-talk’ might seem trivial, and many of us assume that small-talk ‘doesn’t suit’ our personalities. Some people are even offended into others’ intrusions on their personal space. And of course we’re all just not in the bloody mood for it a lot of the time. I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it though. It should be seen as one of the most basic tools for maintaining our mental health, and especially now that our closer communication is halted by further lockdowns.
Small-talk is how we gauge ourselves on a day to day basis. Some people enjoy solitude more than others, though its absence can have effects on us we don’t realise. Mental health, by definition, is often difficult to accurately self-assess at the time. Our own consciousness is like our own universe, and by definition we generally can’t transcend its boundaries – everything that happens, happens in there. If you thinking is off then you don’t know because your thinking is off, and so on. And so I find it’s often only after the fact that I think to myself – that wasn’t so bad at all? Or the opposite, I actually found it a lot tougher than I thought at the time.
Small-talk is something I used to be quite dismissive of, arrogant even. “I don’t need to do that.” “It’s boring”, and so on. But that’s quite a juvenile attitude to adopt, the overly logical mind of an adolescent who’s just beginning to figure out how to semantically bend and break all the rules that have been drilled into them over their childhoods and is exerting their first acts of rebellion. But to remain overly logical throughout your life is to remain undeveloped, and maturity comes when you begin to understand that world of nature and people is not logical, and shouldn’t be treated as such.
The function of small-talk
Small talk is more about communication than information, and as such serves an important function and shouldn’t be ignored, sneered at or derided, for to do so is to sneer at humanity itself. It’s the first line of enquiry into strangers and their inner lives, and our first line of reassurance to the world that we too, are in fact, normal members of society as well, which may be more important to us. It lets you know where you stand – for your own benefit, no-one else’s.
Every country and culture has their own variation of it, their own points of interest they tend to regress to again and again and again; their most common denominator of interlocution. In Ireland, of course, it’s the weather. How’s the weather now, what was it like this past week, what will the future bring to us, how have we been feeling, or thoughts on this that and the other all transmitted through the medium of weather. You can learn an awful lot about someone from how they respond to the weather. And it can be a subtle indication about how they’re feeling in general.
But as I said it’s not about the information, it’s about the act of communication. And although it may seem trivial, it can remind you that you’re doing fine yourself. Not in the sense of a reminder to take out the bins, but more like keeping your sanity topped up. And we all need a bit of that these days.
How to use small talk
Pay attention to how you feel about it, and make the effort to facilitate your bit of it. Making the effort can be enough to keep your own mental health ticking over, to remind yourself that you’re sane.
It's a lot harder to make small talk when everyone’s wearing a mask. Sometimes it requires gymnastics of the eyes. But remember that it’s not about the exchange of logical information and words. It’s an exchange of humanity, and just making the effort to acknowledge some with eye contact or raised eyebrows and a clipped grunt of ‘Well?’ can carry an awful lot of humanity. And if it’s possible then, an acknowledgement that yes, you too are not enjoying this weather we all share, and your experience of these times is also ‘strange’, and yes, you are absolutely delighted with that Mayo performance the last day, and thus are still able to experience some measure of excitement as we head into this long and uncertain winter.
Beyond that, who knows where a cheeky wink might get you with another beautiful soul in these darkening times.
What happens when small talk is taken away from you
A silent meditation retreat was a stark illustration to me of the effects of withdrawing communication has on us. I fancied my chances of being mentally tough enough to endure it. I thought it might even suit me, that I’d have a fast-track one-way ticket to enlightenment while those around me suffered and slogged it out. I got through it, but how wrong I was.
Regardless of the personal circumstances and situations that brought me there, the no-communication aspect made me realise just how important it is for your mental health to communicate with your fellow man and woman – on any level, not just the deep ones. Beginning on day one, life became a daily battle of living inside my own head. It got easier as it went on, but it was difficult throughout. I thought it was just me, and I assumed the ‘no-talking’ rule had nothing to do with it. On the final day, students of the retreat were allowed to speak to one another, and the effect it had on me became apparent within a matter of seconds. Just being able to introduce ourselves, ask each other where we were from, how we were – and discuss the weather.
The effects were immediate, and stark. Although none of these people could see into my mind or offer any assistance or reassurance about the personal things I was thinking about, just speaking to them melted away and resolved so many of those things for me. I truly felt like a different person. I realised so much negativity towards myself was the product of this crucial aspect of my humanity being stripped away.
Small talk is active maintenance of your mental health
All it took was some simple conversation with some kind strangers. Life went on and we all went our separate ways after, perhaps to put into practice things we’d learned about ourselves along the way. But the experience made me realise just how important small-talk and communication are. Thankfully it was only temporary, and self-directed, though imagine such a situation being stretched out over longer time, or practiced, involuntarily, on a regular basis
Small talk is a good way of measuring these things. Keep talking to people. You ask someone how they are in the queue for the checkout, and it might brighten up their day. Or maybe not. There’s only so far it can go, by definition, and you will never know from how someone really feels in those situations. But it reminds you of your own humanity, and it might remind them as well. It’s a practice in active maintenance of your mental health, and we all have to play our part in it for each other.
We can’t visit our friends and neighbours, and important things may get left unsaid over the phone or the Zoom over the next while. But you can keep yourself sane in the mean-time by talking about the weather. Thank god for that Mayo performance too, until next weekend at least, or it might make the small talk unbearable to relive it. And if your mask is blocking the flow of natural and easy conversation, you can always give someone a wink – you never know how you might feel after it.
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Great article Gavin and a wink always went a long way. Eyes can say so much