Small-Talk as a Normality Filter

Subtlety and Smart conversation

This is Jamie’s Room, a once a day musing about my career, purpose and what I learn from failing at a bunch of things.

Robert Greene has quite a harsh view of human beings as actors. I’ve wrestled with this slightly as I found reading the first couple of chapters of Power that he promoted the idea that socializing is utilitarian and should be aimed at with the view of self-gain.

My first thoughts when I read this was that this was no means towards unity and social concordance. To socialize this way was false and inauthentic. I deeply wanted to reject his idea that we are actors playing games to get closer to what we want out of the world.

To be clear, his opinion is not nearly as harsh as I first received it. I can see now that while he views almost all social interaction as a game of power, he doesn’t mean for this to be inauthentic. In fact, Greene wants to empower people to engage with others with conviction and truth. - Though to be aware of the varying opportunities to grab favor and benefits.

Yet, I have a distinct memory of being with a group of kids and beginning to get tired of their company and noise. I left the group and went to sit alone behind a shed and I had a great time by myself, until they found me and mocked me for being alone. I always thought this strange, and repeatedly found that most people struggle to be on their own.

I had a realization then that though there were practical games that we would play as kids, there was also a deeper social game where my way of acting was either received warmly or I was rejected. When I realized that I began to see how I could cater my behavior to gain further approval - Jordan Peterson speaks about playing the game that can help you play more games.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this is when I learnt to be self-conscious.

A big part of this substack has been directed towards speech and how to do it better. It’s noticing where others sit in their frame and catering my ideas/perceptions to their position, it’s also about speaking about ideas and thoughts clearly and leaving less room to be misunderstood.

This one is going to be more along the lines of the second point, how our speech can actually be construed as a normality filter. The typical small talk that almost everyone dislikes is really a means towards recognizing a like minded “Normal” individual. I’d always found it interesting when no one would want to “dive deep” with me. I’d meet someone new and ask them a question that had been brewing in my mind and yet receive very blank looks in return.

As I grew older I thought I was a bit different and since I couldn’t relate to most people. I’m older still and realize, through the many deep conversations with a variety of people, that it wasn’t because I was different to others but because they didn’t trust me enough to expose their thoughts.

So the goal then is to engage in better small-talk to open the gates towards richer conversation.

So why is this relevant and how does it connect with Robert Greene’s thesis on Power.

If we look at the quality of conversations that we have, the majority of us will agree that we want better conversations and more opportunity to talk about the things that we are thinking about - See Babble and Prune. Yet we routinely fail to have the meaningful conversations with people we love (and people we tolerate). So how do we get there?

I propose, to get what we want out of our conversations, we give a little to get a little more. We can think of Small-Talk as an opportunity generation mechanic that opens the door to future meaningful conversations. If we provide people with the assessment that we are normal-enough-to-keep-chatting it invariably will open our chances to have the conversations we want in future.

Small-Talk is the door that opens future conversation

So, let me encourage you, Small-Talk is boring and often mundane but if you recognize its banality and still lean into it with the intention for future conversation, it can lead to a wealth of interesting knowledge sharing.

Jamie