small talk / The Realness Manifesto

 

Small talk is like the top up oil for our engines. The sound of a screeching halt isn't acceptable in everyday life. Everything must be progressing forward 24/7, 7 days a week. Internet banking, neon signs, cash registers, traffic lights, queues and also us. The lives of individuals. People are engines too. Just as mechanical and complex as everything else in nature. What interests me is how both parties of small talk are aware that they are engaging in small talk simply to engine themselves forward despite the complete emptiness? How can something so meaningless such as small talk be such an integral part of our everyday lives? Who would ever state that the insincere could be so important? We are indoctrinated to value the real and the genuine in life. It's food, it's feelings, it's output. All this must be genuine in order to count.

Sure, if we stopped the small talk things would probably escalate into awkwardness pretty quickly. If we stopped making small talk, then perhaps the whole world would become way too uncomfortable to smoothly run itself. But don't people get frustrated with it at least? I do, i do a lot. It seems like the entire world needs a lubricant smoothed over the surface so we can glide seamlessly from one point to another. Yet the lubricant is nothing but phoneyness and meaningless banter. I participate in it, create this phoneyness even but damn do i get frustrated with making small talk when it is so fucking inane. The worst thing is being shot down when you try to be real with someone. Out of their fear or embarrassment, they turn the tables on you to bear their discomfort. The entire running of the world depends on phoneyness. Job interviews come to mind mainly. We both know why we're here, we both know that nothing of this is real. That i'm strategically forming my answers in order to gain credit and credibility. That you are silently setting traps for me to fall into. Let's just cut to the chase. Why don't you just ask me what I can really offer you beyond my skills? What about the things i've been through outside of work that contribute to me as a person? After all, that's all you're really hiring.

This is why i started telling people how i really was when they asked me, "How are you?". I couldn't deal with throwing out any more fake answers. I couldn't take answering back in the normal fashion. "Yeah, good thanks". I mean what the fuck is that? That's nothing, that's what it is. Nothing. The answers i have were not pretty. On a bad day, i'd tell people that i was feeling shit. On a sad day, simply a massive sigh. And people were weirded out by how straight i'd put it. Anything to avoid goddamn small talk, i'd think to myself. Anything to put out what was really happening to the world and not be apologetic about it at all. Of course, people didn't know how to respond but that was OK. I was not expecting miracle responses. I was simply putting out something into the world that was not small talk.

To be continued...