I know small-talk is not an emotion, but I figured I'd put my musings here anyway. The following is an excerpt from a chat I had with a good friend of mine, who wishes to remain anonymous: me: I think I might have just (consciously) figured out small talk, and how it's supposed to work, and why it's acceptable to most people and mostly not acceptable to me. ! Not-Me: :D what's the insight? me: The insight is that I know more than I think I do. :-รพ (I should have phrased that as that I just consciously figured out that I now understand ...) Less snarky answer coming momentarily So, for the why other people are fine with it and I'm not: other people (I think) place more value on interacting pleasantly/making friends with people they don't know. They probably assume that, most of the time, if they put a little bit of work in, they'll get a friendship/interaction that was worth that effort. I think that there are fewer people who I actually enjoy interacting with (or maybe it's just harder to get to something that I find really interesting), so, statistically, it's not worth the effort to make small talk. People are not mind readers, and are better at doing social interactions than at predicting them. So, assuming that it's worth talking to someone, it's more efficient to try lots of topics and allow tangents to "help you" find a topic than to sit there trying to think of a topic you'd both be interested in. It also keeps you in the habit of talking, which helps because *mumble* *mumble* cues you pick up subconsciously when talking to people that make it easier to talk with them in the future. Not-Me: ooh. I agree with that part very much. me: :-) Not-Me: also it makes it easier to talk about the topic once you do find that topic, because you get the momentum going me: nods Not-Me: it's a lot easier to shift the topic to something interesting than to start up a conversation out of silence me: Right. I think I was trying to express something like that with my "being in the habit of talking". :-) Not-Me: ah, yeah, I wasn't sure whether you meant longer-term or short-term. me: "Both" :-) / :-P Not-Me: think this is the best description of why small talk isn't useless I've seen. kudos. :) me: :-D kiwi! (I'm curious, what other descriptions have you seen?) Not-Me: mostly along the lines of "haha, other people and their social norms are SO STUPID, they just do small talk because they're expected to" which is not that much of an explanation, I guess :p me: ( :-P I find the approach of "People do this thing. It's extremely mysterious to me. But people do do it, and it started somehow, and I believe in evolution, so it must have an explanation. So, why do people do it?" is a much more productive mindset than "haha, other people and their social norms are SO STUPID" ) Not-Me: that is a mindbogglingly sane way to think of things me: :-D *chuckles aloud* (I used to have the second approach, at least implicitly, but I've been moving more and more towards assuming there's a good reason for things (and then being disappointed when the reason is something like "perverted evolutionary mechanisms", which seems to be the explanation for self-deception (it's good to feel bad about bad things. it's good to not feel bad about {things you can't change,things in general} because if you don't feel bad about something, then it's probably fine. it's much easier to trick yourself into not feeling bad about something by avoiding it than it is to accept that it's unchangeable/being changed, and not feel bad about it for that reason)) [going back to small-talk: This might also explain why there exist socially standard greetings; we've picked a few ~universally applicable ways to start a conversation out of silence, and thus made it possible for us to not have to do the hard work of making a conversation from scratch, but only the work of shifting it to a good topic.] Not-Me: or maybe just whenever someone uses a greeting that's a bit more awesome then the one the hearer usually uses, they pick it up and start using it too like, maybe it's not just laziness but also that these are the best possible ways to start a conversation I am being slightly devilsadvocaty here me: nods Not-Me: but I would love it if it were the case that acknowledging the goodness of the morning were the best possible mindset for a conversation to start in me: lol Not-Me: (actually, people who don't have interesting conversations together tend to not have more, so you end up having more conversations with the people who start their conversations well) (so it's like how a successful organism makes more babies) (the good greeting has more chances to propagate) me: I don't think they're optimal for everyone. Probably just optimal on average? (I read that as "so it's like how a successful orgasm makes more babies" at first :-P) (but, yeah, nods ) I wonder what the life-cycle of greetings is...