I just gave a presentation ("Aristotle and Ayn Rand on the Nature and Art of Friendship") on this topic at a conference last Thursday! As an Aristotle scholar, I heartily second everything you say about cultivating character friendship. As a shy introvert, I also keep working on this. :o)
Years ago a friend called me about three in the morning and needed help. Got up and my (ex)wife asked what I was doing. Told her and she said can't it wait. No, if a friend calls you at three in the morning, you go. So when the time comes that you call them at three in the morning you know that they will just show up. When it came to my children it was the same deal. Don't care where you are, who you're with, or what is going on. Call me, I will come and get you, no questions asked. Will just get you home. We will talk about it the next day. Nothing is more relieving than your child knowing they can call for help with no questions asked, no drama, just knowing you are there for them. But we will have this discussion later.
Friendship is difficult, I suspect, because we no longer need other people. Our needs are not met, our safety is not secured, and our problems are not solved by people. They are met, secured, and solved by institutions. Those institutions are staffed by people, of course, but those people are interchangeable. Who knows who we will meet behind the counter or speak to on the phone tomorrow? Our reliance on institutions is no basis for the formation of friendships with people.
And this, I suspect, is why our society places so little value on virtue. If we relied on individuals, we would care that they were people of virtue, since we would rely on them to act in times when their actions were more to our benefit than to their own (surely the definition of virtue). Because we rely on institutions, not people, we care about the virtue of institutions, not the virtue of people. We tie up institutions in countless laws and regulations to induce them to be virtuous. When it comes to people, we care much more that they are safe than that they are virtuous. We don't expect them to save us. We mostly want them not to annoy us.
And when all our needs are met by institutions, and it is the virtue of institutions that we care about, what is there to talk of day to day? What kind of talk is left but small talk?
This is truly brilliant article, Liza! So much valuable insight here! Why are we so lonely nowadays in modern America even though in a sense more connected than ever? Statistics show that your average person has plenty of friends, but they aren't as close with them as they would like to be. Aristotle provides us with answer to why to this. We need to seek out friendships of virtue. I hate small talk, I find it boring, shallow, awkward, and not stimulating. It comes off as very superficial and it's not interesting, exciting or insightful. It doesn't surprise me that you feel the same, Liza. We seek out friendships but for the wrong reasons. We as a society seek out friendships purely for pleasure or for professional gain. Instead, we need to cut past all the bs and talk about the things in life that matter! I hope that's the kind of friendship I have built with you, Liza. It's really been a pleasure getting to know you through your articles and learning about who you are, the struggles you've faced both as a writer and as a person and how you've overcome. Also, to learn about your core beliefs and all the amazing essays you write with so many nuggets of wisdom. As a person on the autism spectrum, this is very valuable article for as someone who struggles with building social connections period. Thank you so much for this! I struggled for many years as I grew into adulthood to fit into a society that in which neurodiverse people like me are often marginalized, seen as weirdos, freaks, crazy, etc., are neglected and abused, left to roam the streets, unemployed, forgotten, etc. Having depression, anxiety, ADHD, and OCD didn't help matters either as I have always feared making friends or talking to people as I feared pushing way or repelling people, being perceived as insane/psychopathic/unstable, embarrassing myself, etc. I was even told one time in a private message by someone "get therapy, you are insane...it is ridiculous my friends have to deal with you!", "you are a f***ing loser!" and "you have no idea how to socialize!" Even now as I type this, I'm a bit reluctant to post this comment as I fear alienating others who might read this or that they'll judge me and see me in a negative light because of this comment. But after reading this essay, I feel like I have this incredible knowledge that can even someone like me crack a code that most people are born with the ability to crack but I didn't get the memo! Thank you, Liza! I mean that sincerely and from the heart! We need to have deeper, more intellectual conversations with one another that is we can cure the Loneliness Epidemic in western society, de-polarize this nation and prevent a second American Civil War! Here are some titles I'd recommend to everyone to help us combat the loneliness and mental health epidemics that plague our society:
* Emotional First Aid: Healing Rejection, Guilt, Failure, and Other Everyday Hurts by Guy Winch, Ph.D.
* Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick
* No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak on Mental Health in America by Ron Powers
* Better Small Talk: Talk to Anyone, Avoid Awkwardness, Generate Deep Conversations, and Make Real Friends by Patrick King
* The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture by Gabor Mate
* Better Together: Restoring the American Community by Robert D. Putnam
* Bowling Alone: Updated and Revised: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam
* Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle
* Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age by Sherry Turkle
* Bedlam: An Intimate Journey Into America's Mental Health Crisis by Kenneth Paul Rosenberg
* What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen by Kate Fagan
It’s not small talk people despise, it’s people. We perhaps think we’re better than the average person and don’t see the sheer beauty in the way others speak or describe things or what they choose to share.
But I don’t see how a person who is genuinely curious about other people wouldn’t just talk to someone and enjoy it without needing it to mean something or validate their self-image.
So true, the last few years have been really hard to live and overcome, so my friends from highschool and I rarely talk. But when we do, we talk about the “philosophy” of everything and our current perception of life, avoiding small talk completely. It's a weird phenomenon but i'm glad that we kind of turned our friendship from school into a virtue friendship. It requires a lot of shared trauma and despair, imo.
I have been able to avoid small talk for many years by staying at home to raise a large family. Although children start out small, they don't engage in small talk ie talking about trivialities. They talk about what matters.
Now that the children have grown up and I have re-entered 'society' (!), I just don't do small talk.
Yesterday in our local park, I chatted to another widow about our now grownup children, the hot weather (this is the UK), finding sleep difficult and so on. None of it was small talk; all of it was meaningful.
It is not the subjects that make conversation meaningful or trivial; it is the level of attention, thought and sympathy you bring to them.
The significance of small talk is something I have been painfully learning about. I was always an extreme introvert, but when I got married after college me and my new husband spent our first 5 years together in 3 different states and 5 different cities for various reasons. Leaving everything familiar behind and my large family and church family, I finally realized how much I needed people. Especially once I started staying home with my first child. The small talk with another mom at the park or coffee shop might be the only adult conversation I had all day until my husband got home from work. I have learned how desperately some people need a few polite and inane niceties as you hold the door open for someone or wait in line next to each other. I realized how privileged my disdain for small talk was.
We have now been in the (almost) the same community for almost two years, and I find the hump between friendly acquaintance and meaningful friends to be really challenging to make. Even with people that we have explicitly made reciprocated effort with. These kinds of friendship of virtue not only take time and commitment, but also risk. You don’t just have to plan regular time together, someone has to come out and share something vulnerable or ask for help when it is needed. Someone has to take the risk of losing a more superficial friendship for the sake of potentially building a meaningful, lasting friendship.
Two things: 1) I typically like trying new things in my leisure, but committing to being a regular at coffee shops and diners helps so much with having meaningful utilitarian friendships. It's become more than mere politeness and I have also enjoyed the stability. 2) More people need to give the Ethics a read. It's surprisingly easy and delightful for a such a seminal work of philosophy. Thank you so much for sharing!
This accords with my own experience. I am a mathematician, at least some of the time, and we tend to be the introverts' introverts. This is partly because even small talk is limited, as no one ever asks "so how is work going?" because most people want to hear as little about mathematics as they can possibly manage. It goes deeper than that, of course, since mathematicians, along with poets, writers of all sorts, artists, philosophers, historians, and so on, are all deeply committed to an abstract interior world which is difficult to share at the best of times.
One of my favorite Bible quotes, because of its broad applicability beyond religion, is "where your treasure lies, there will your heart be." If what you treasure is something essentially interior, then your heart will be an interior heart, and the surface contact of small talk will be very, very unfulfilling. The only conversation (and friendship) worth having will be one in which we reach into one another and touch that interior.
This is not to disparage extroverts or imply that they are shallow. I know a man who is extremely extroverted, so much so that his daughter and I share a standing joke that watching him try to cross a room is like watching the ball in a pinball machine. He stops to talk to absolutely everyone and takes a Brownian-motion path to the coffee, the buffet, the restroom, or wherever he is trying to go. And yet he does not make small talk. He can drop immediately into deep and sincere discussion of what is most on the mind of each person, and he can do it 10, 20, 50 times in a row. I admire that tremendously, but it makes my head hurt just to watch it, which is how I know I'm an introvert.
It has been decades since I read the Nicomachean Ethics, so maybe it's time for a refresher. I think Aristotle has it right, and the first two kinds of friendship he describes are what would be in modern terms called "transactional." (I think Martin Buber's Ich und Du might also have something to say here as well.) When the friendship has utility or a shared activity as its center, the two people are almost incidental. When the focus of each person is the other person, it is the utility or shared activity which is incidental. Small talk is "between people" whereas people are "immersed in" a conversation. The spatial metaphors built into these common phrases capture the difference well. Small talk is conversation turned inside out.
I think most of us have experienced that moment in a book or a film, where something is done wrong, some authorial or directorial mistake, and the bubble of suspended disbelief pops, and we suddenly find ourselves in a chair holding a book, or in a somewhat sticky theater seat in a darkened room. It can be quite shocking to be expelled abruptly in that way, and this exterior space is the space where small talk lives, where I find myself watching myself converse and wondering when it will be over so I can move on. What could be more alienating that the sense that you are not in the conversation you are having? On the other hand, in a good conversation, as in a good book or film, time ceases to exist; one is immersed in the other. That is bliss, and that is where my heart is. Sadly, such conversations do not come along that often, nor do the friendships which both grow out of and support them.
Popping out of my own bubble here, I note that it takes me ten minutes to disagree with a post, but an hour to agree with one. I wonder what that says? Oh well, enough for now.
Totally agree with the assessment of utility and pleasure as the highest societal values determining friendships. But there is also our obsession with perfection versus imperfection. And small talk is enabled because people often don't want to talk about either "P" or "IP" because they are "too deep." Or they would rather talk superficially about their own perfection and in-depth or unsuperficially about the imperfections of others they are intensely in competition with.
These tendencies are bolstered by the idea that perfection is something the perfect are born with and not to be strenuously worked at in order to be achieved or talked about because if one is perfect they need to only hang out with other perfect people. If one of their supposed friends says or does something slightly imperfect, they are canceled, banned or banished for life. Small talk establishes a tenuous connection that can be easily disconnected if either person finds anything imperfect about the other.
So friendship becomes a competition between perfect people who engage in small talk with other perfect people so they superficially compliment each other on their perfection or share perfect type stuff with one another. And thereby totally avoid the unwashed imperfect rabble, the perfect always helicopter monitoring their small talk or all their conversations whether superficially or occasionally deep, which all too often too easily provoke anger and rancor. So small talk is so much easier.
These are the privileged insiders who are usually expert extroverts.
Introverts are the outsiders who the insiders feel must be imperfect in some way because they are on the outside, because they are outsiders.
You see this reflected politically and religiously or both together. Capitalists are seen as perfect because of being wealthy. Socialists are seen as being perfect because they are supposededly not wealthy or mostly avoid appearing to be wealthy. Not being wealthy or perfect, being easier for us not wealthy folk to identify with.
The higher virtues that Aristotle talked about just don't appear or appear totally unachievable if they appear at all. Perfection is resident in Jesus or Chairman Mao so one has to choose whether they want to live more in the example of Jesus or more in the example of Chairman Mao. (Jesus and Mao are spiritually wealthy and then the argument because Jesus allows personal material wealth and Mao doesn't except that of the collective State of which he is the chairman). But the higher virtues really are just too deep to discuss, so there is small talk.
And all of this is so polarizing and way too deep to talk about. Because most of it can be understood by a small child. The irony is that small children after listen to adults talking and can immediately recognize the honesty or wisdom and easily reject the dishonesty and stupidity. Of course that is not socially acceptable so we all have to resort to small talk to avoid anything unpleasant and pass the time.
I just gave a presentation ("Aristotle and Ayn Rand on the Nature and Art of Friendship") on this topic at a conference last Thursday! As an Aristotle scholar, I heartily second everything you say about cultivating character friendship. As a shy introvert, I also keep working on this. :o)
Years ago a friend called me about three in the morning and needed help. Got up and my (ex)wife asked what I was doing. Told her and she said can't it wait. No, if a friend calls you at three in the morning, you go. So when the time comes that you call them at three in the morning you know that they will just show up. When it came to my children it was the same deal. Don't care where you are, who you're with, or what is going on. Call me, I will come and get you, no questions asked. Will just get you home. We will talk about it the next day. Nothing is more relieving than your child knowing they can call for help with no questions asked, no drama, just knowing you are there for them. But we will have this discussion later.
Friendship is difficult, I suspect, because we no longer need other people. Our needs are not met, our safety is not secured, and our problems are not solved by people. They are met, secured, and solved by institutions. Those institutions are staffed by people, of course, but those people are interchangeable. Who knows who we will meet behind the counter or speak to on the phone tomorrow? Our reliance on institutions is no basis for the formation of friendships with people.
And this, I suspect, is why our society places so little value on virtue. If we relied on individuals, we would care that they were people of virtue, since we would rely on them to act in times when their actions were more to our benefit than to their own (surely the definition of virtue). Because we rely on institutions, not people, we care about the virtue of institutions, not the virtue of people. We tie up institutions in countless laws and regulations to induce them to be virtuous. When it comes to people, we care much more that they are safe than that they are virtuous. We don't expect them to save us. We mostly want them not to annoy us.
And when all our needs are met by institutions, and it is the virtue of institutions that we care about, what is there to talk of day to day? What kind of talk is left but small talk?
This is truly brilliant article, Liza! So much valuable insight here! Why are we so lonely nowadays in modern America even though in a sense more connected than ever? Statistics show that your average person has plenty of friends, but they aren't as close with them as they would like to be. Aristotle provides us with answer to why to this. We need to seek out friendships of virtue. I hate small talk, I find it boring, shallow, awkward, and not stimulating. It comes off as very superficial and it's not interesting, exciting or insightful. It doesn't surprise me that you feel the same, Liza. We seek out friendships but for the wrong reasons. We as a society seek out friendships purely for pleasure or for professional gain. Instead, we need to cut past all the bs and talk about the things in life that matter! I hope that's the kind of friendship I have built with you, Liza. It's really been a pleasure getting to know you through your articles and learning about who you are, the struggles you've faced both as a writer and as a person and how you've overcome. Also, to learn about your core beliefs and all the amazing essays you write with so many nuggets of wisdom. As a person on the autism spectrum, this is very valuable article for as someone who struggles with building social connections period. Thank you so much for this! I struggled for many years as I grew into adulthood to fit into a society that in which neurodiverse people like me are often marginalized, seen as weirdos, freaks, crazy, etc., are neglected and abused, left to roam the streets, unemployed, forgotten, etc. Having depression, anxiety, ADHD, and OCD didn't help matters either as I have always feared making friends or talking to people as I feared pushing way or repelling people, being perceived as insane/psychopathic/unstable, embarrassing myself, etc. I was even told one time in a private message by someone "get therapy, you are insane...it is ridiculous my friends have to deal with you!", "you are a f***ing loser!" and "you have no idea how to socialize!" Even now as I type this, I'm a bit reluctant to post this comment as I fear alienating others who might read this or that they'll judge me and see me in a negative light because of this comment. But after reading this essay, I feel like I have this incredible knowledge that can even someone like me crack a code that most people are born with the ability to crack but I didn't get the memo! Thank you, Liza! I mean that sincerely and from the heart! We need to have deeper, more intellectual conversations with one another that is we can cure the Loneliness Epidemic in western society, de-polarize this nation and prevent a second American Civil War! Here are some titles I'd recommend to everyone to help us combat the loneliness and mental health epidemics that plague our society:
* Emotional First Aid: Healing Rejection, Guilt, Failure, and Other Everyday Hurts by Guy Winch, Ph.D.
* Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick
* No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak on Mental Health in America by Ron Powers
* Better Small Talk: Talk to Anyone, Avoid Awkwardness, Generate Deep Conversations, and Make Real Friends by Patrick King
* The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture by Gabor Mate
* Better Together: Restoring the American Community by Robert D. Putnam
* Bowling Alone: Updated and Revised: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam
* Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle
* Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age by Sherry Turkle
* Bedlam: An Intimate Journey Into America's Mental Health Crisis by Kenneth Paul Rosenberg
* What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen by Kate Fagan
It’s not small talk people despise, it’s people. We perhaps think we’re better than the average person and don’t see the sheer beauty in the way others speak or describe things or what they choose to share.
But I don’t see how a person who is genuinely curious about other people wouldn’t just talk to someone and enjoy it without needing it to mean something or validate their self-image.
So true, the last few years have been really hard to live and overcome, so my friends from highschool and I rarely talk. But when we do, we talk about the “philosophy” of everything and our current perception of life, avoiding small talk completely. It's a weird phenomenon but i'm glad that we kind of turned our friendship from school into a virtue friendship. It requires a lot of shared trauma and despair, imo.
I have been able to avoid small talk for many years by staying at home to raise a large family. Although children start out small, they don't engage in small talk ie talking about trivialities. They talk about what matters.
Now that the children have grown up and I have re-entered 'society' (!), I just don't do small talk.
Yesterday in our local park, I chatted to another widow about our now grownup children, the hot weather (this is the UK), finding sleep difficult and so on. None of it was small talk; all of it was meaningful.
It is not the subjects that make conversation meaningful or trivial; it is the level of attention, thought and sympathy you bring to them.
The significance of small talk is something I have been painfully learning about. I was always an extreme introvert, but when I got married after college me and my new husband spent our first 5 years together in 3 different states and 5 different cities for various reasons. Leaving everything familiar behind and my large family and church family, I finally realized how much I needed people. Especially once I started staying home with my first child. The small talk with another mom at the park or coffee shop might be the only adult conversation I had all day until my husband got home from work. I have learned how desperately some people need a few polite and inane niceties as you hold the door open for someone or wait in line next to each other. I realized how privileged my disdain for small talk was.
We have now been in the (almost) the same community for almost two years, and I find the hump between friendly acquaintance and meaningful friends to be really challenging to make. Even with people that we have explicitly made reciprocated effort with. These kinds of friendship of virtue not only take time and commitment, but also risk. You don’t just have to plan regular time together, someone has to come out and share something vulnerable or ask for help when it is needed. Someone has to take the risk of losing a more superficial friendship for the sake of potentially building a meaningful, lasting friendship.
Two things: 1) I typically like trying new things in my leisure, but committing to being a regular at coffee shops and diners helps so much with having meaningful utilitarian friendships. It's become more than mere politeness and I have also enjoyed the stability. 2) More people need to give the Ethics a read. It's surprisingly easy and delightful for a such a seminal work of philosophy. Thank you so much for sharing!
This accords with my own experience. I am a mathematician, at least some of the time, and we tend to be the introverts' introverts. This is partly because even small talk is limited, as no one ever asks "so how is work going?" because most people want to hear as little about mathematics as they can possibly manage. It goes deeper than that, of course, since mathematicians, along with poets, writers of all sorts, artists, philosophers, historians, and so on, are all deeply committed to an abstract interior world which is difficult to share at the best of times.
One of my favorite Bible quotes, because of its broad applicability beyond religion, is "where your treasure lies, there will your heart be." If what you treasure is something essentially interior, then your heart will be an interior heart, and the surface contact of small talk will be very, very unfulfilling. The only conversation (and friendship) worth having will be one in which we reach into one another and touch that interior.
This is not to disparage extroverts or imply that they are shallow. I know a man who is extremely extroverted, so much so that his daughter and I share a standing joke that watching him try to cross a room is like watching the ball in a pinball machine. He stops to talk to absolutely everyone and takes a Brownian-motion path to the coffee, the buffet, the restroom, or wherever he is trying to go. And yet he does not make small talk. He can drop immediately into deep and sincere discussion of what is most on the mind of each person, and he can do it 10, 20, 50 times in a row. I admire that tremendously, but it makes my head hurt just to watch it, which is how I know I'm an introvert.
It has been decades since I read the Nicomachean Ethics, so maybe it's time for a refresher. I think Aristotle has it right, and the first two kinds of friendship he describes are what would be in modern terms called "transactional." (I think Martin Buber's Ich und Du might also have something to say here as well.) When the friendship has utility or a shared activity as its center, the two people are almost incidental. When the focus of each person is the other person, it is the utility or shared activity which is incidental. Small talk is "between people" whereas people are "immersed in" a conversation. The spatial metaphors built into these common phrases capture the difference well. Small talk is conversation turned inside out.
I think most of us have experienced that moment in a book or a film, where something is done wrong, some authorial or directorial mistake, and the bubble of suspended disbelief pops, and we suddenly find ourselves in a chair holding a book, or in a somewhat sticky theater seat in a darkened room. It can be quite shocking to be expelled abruptly in that way, and this exterior space is the space where small talk lives, where I find myself watching myself converse and wondering when it will be over so I can move on. What could be more alienating that the sense that you are not in the conversation you are having? On the other hand, in a good conversation, as in a good book or film, time ceases to exist; one is immersed in the other. That is bliss, and that is where my heart is. Sadly, such conversations do not come along that often, nor do the friendships which both grow out of and support them.
Popping out of my own bubble here, I note that it takes me ten minutes to disagree with a post, but an hour to agree with one. I wonder what that says? Oh well, enough for now.
Totally agree with the assessment of utility and pleasure as the highest societal values determining friendships. But there is also our obsession with perfection versus imperfection. And small talk is enabled because people often don't want to talk about either "P" or "IP" because they are "too deep." Or they would rather talk superficially about their own perfection and in-depth or unsuperficially about the imperfections of others they are intensely in competition with.
These tendencies are bolstered by the idea that perfection is something the perfect are born with and not to be strenuously worked at in order to be achieved or talked about because if one is perfect they need to only hang out with other perfect people. If one of their supposed friends says or does something slightly imperfect, they are canceled, banned or banished for life. Small talk establishes a tenuous connection that can be easily disconnected if either person finds anything imperfect about the other.
So friendship becomes a competition between perfect people who engage in small talk with other perfect people so they superficially compliment each other on their perfection or share perfect type stuff with one another. And thereby totally avoid the unwashed imperfect rabble, the perfect always helicopter monitoring their small talk or all their conversations whether superficially or occasionally deep, which all too often too easily provoke anger and rancor. So small talk is so much easier.
These are the privileged insiders who are usually expert extroverts.
Introverts are the outsiders who the insiders feel must be imperfect in some way because they are on the outside, because they are outsiders.
You see this reflected politically and religiously or both together. Capitalists are seen as perfect because of being wealthy. Socialists are seen as being perfect because they are supposededly not wealthy or mostly avoid appearing to be wealthy. Not being wealthy or perfect, being easier for us not wealthy folk to identify with.
The higher virtues that Aristotle talked about just don't appear or appear totally unachievable if they appear at all. Perfection is resident in Jesus or Chairman Mao so one has to choose whether they want to live more in the example of Jesus or more in the example of Chairman Mao. (Jesus and Mao are spiritually wealthy and then the argument because Jesus allows personal material wealth and Mao doesn't except that of the collective State of which he is the chairman). But the higher virtues really are just too deep to discuss, so there is small talk.
And all of this is so polarizing and way too deep to talk about. Because most of it can be understood by a small child. The irony is that small children after listen to adults talking and can immediately recognize the honesty or wisdom and easily reject the dishonesty and stupidity. Of course that is not socially acceptable so we all have to resort to small talk to avoid anything unpleasant and pass the time.