TIME – Read More
I used to avoid small talk at all costs. It seemed pointless to spend my time having meaningless conversations with people I am unlikely to ever see again. I would rather reserve my energy for exchanges with people that I knew I would be building a relationship with.
But over time, I realized how transactional that felt. Am I only willing to have authentic conversations with people who I know have something to offer me in the long run? And what message was I sending to strangers?
In the past, I have been at networking parties where someone I am talking to is looking over my shoulder, trying to assess if the person who just arrived is more important to speak to. That gave me the ick, and I realized I never want to treat other people that way.
So, I have personally been building my small talk skills in the past year. It is important to learn to have a genuine interaction with someone, even if you won’t see them again or if they can’t offer you anything. These seemingly insignificant exchanges are a way of acknowledging the people around us. Small talk can create tiny moments of connection in places that might otherwise feel anonymous, whether that’s with a gate agent at the airport or the person sitting next to you on a train.
I never expected small talk to pay off, but when I had nine kilograms of excess baggage on a long-haul flight from Asia, my small-talk skills saved me from paying hundreds of dollars. The flight agent that I had spent a few minutes speaking to earlier about how much shopping I had done waved off the entire $300 excess baggage fee without me needing to open my bags to rearrange my things. I paid zero dollars. Another time, engaging in small talk with someone at a run club in Lisbon resulted in being invited to a house party where I found a friendship group in a city where I knew no one.
The benefits of small talk go beyond waived fees and party invitations, and research helps explain why. One study determined that having more interactions with people with whom you have weak social ties (for example, with the barista at a coffee shop or cashier at a grocery store) led to greater happiness and a stronger sense of belonging.
“Small talk has a big impact on psychological wellbeing, both for self and others,” says Phillip Wagner, a clinical associate professor at William & Mary’s Raymond A. Mason School of Business. Even when we dread these exchanges, he explains, we often come away glad we engaged.
So much of my professional experience hinges on making small talk with publicists and editors that I have associated small talk as a skill to be deployed only when I need something quite specific. My friends in other professions have a similar experience. Promotion and bonuses at their full-time job is dependent on how good they are at making small talk with senior management.
We are conditioned to see small talk as transactional—a way of reducing people to what they do, not who they are. Those conversations “reinforce our role authority and not our own unique value,” says Wagner. “Small talk gives us an opportunity to share the breadth of our humanity with others.”
And too often, we reduce people to labels as a means of self-preservation and protection. For instance, I very rarely speak to people who have the opposite political leaning than mine because I assume we don’t have the same values. When I was eating at a restaurant in a hotel in the Dolomites recently, an older American man started talking to me about what’s good on the menu as he was eating alone at an adjacent table. Pretty soon, our conversation headed towards immigration and politics and we realized our values were completely opposite.
Even though we disagreed on almost everything, I know I wouldn’t ever have a conversation with someone like him had it not started with small talk. I was glad to be able to see the perspective of someone who would never be a part of my social circle. “Small talk and those brief conversations we have with strangers actually help prove that people are mostly benign and mostly interested in the world beyond themselves,” says Wagner.
That’s why I stopped leading with “What do you do for work?” and started asking about people’s interests instead. Learning how to have small talk with strangers has made me more open and socially confident, and in an increasingly transactional and screen-mediated world, small talk might matter more than we think.
I’m learning that a conversation doesn’t need to lead to a friendship, a favor, or a professional opportunity to matter. Not only do those interactions help erode loneliness, but they also help foster a sense of hope in the collective human condition.
Making someone feel seen is reason enough.
