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Comment by minikites | Hacker News Reader

This is America, where we ask strangers, "So, what do you do for a living?" as an opening question because income generation is the most important thing about a person in the USA.

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Or, more charitably, because we're interested in what it it they actually do, as opposed to the income itself. There is an issue with conflating work and what's the most important defining characteristic of a person, but I don't think it has to do with income in general.

We don't ask that question though. That could be covered by "So, what are you interested in?" and if it happens to overlap employment, you find out just the same.

We ask what people do because everybody does something, while only a fraction of people have hobbies. (Hobbies include people whose work is their hobby, and exclude people who happen to care deeply about more private, or at least bigger-than-smalltalk things.)

Strange that more people have jobs than hobbies...

Why is it strange? What do you draw from that? Why do you think that is? Please add something more substantial than an open-ended possibly deep question with trailing ellipses.

I can't think of anyone I know who doesn't have some sort of hobby. You seem to be excluding a lot of things with those qualifiers.

Well, if you don't spend the most hours of your day at work, you spend them sleeping. And it would be pretty dull to ask someone "how do you spend most of your time?" and they said "sleeping". In fact, it would sound rude and dismissive.

What else? Oh, I'm married. Cool. I live in a house. Yeah. Exciting.

Just say you freelance.

"How do you spend your time" is a better question.

We also make small talk about the weather, even though nobody really gives a shit what anyone else thinks about the weather. And we ask how people are doing, even if we don't care.

I don't think "how people talk to strangers" is a representation of what people in the culture care about.

That's not at all why we do that.. It's just to find out things about a person if you have no information, so you can find something to talk about.

You miss the point. The fact that you start by asking that question first, instead of say "what do you love doing" or "where do you live" says a lot about culture.

Those other questions are too intimate for a conversation starter.

"Too intimate" as defined by our culture.

No, I don't miss the point. It would very weird in all the cultures I'm part of to ask those questions first, not because anyone cares about money, but because those are too specific and would weird the other person out.

Northern European here:

I'd also find it a bit weird (edit: or awkward) if someone started by asking what I love to do:

Is this a salesman or a recruiter?

Maybe a teacher?

And what should I answer that wouldn't be weird? "Volunteering for Troll patrol at Internet forums"?, "Writing Java"?, "Sleeping"?

> And what should I answer that wouldn't be weird? "Volunteering for Troll patrol at Internet forums"?, "Writing Java"?, "Sleeping"?

Honestly the weirder the better. Its a great icebreaker.

“Where do you live” seems like an even less interesting question.

If you're an adult more often than not, you'll be trading your time for income. Therefore this is a safe comparatively in offensive question to start a conversation. Given a working person spends around half their waking hours working, many will opt to choose something interesting to them. Whether it's the culture, the vision or the nature of the work it can lead onto more interesting topics of conversation.

It's a lazy one, but so is remarking about the weather or mentioning something about current affairs.

Why not go straight to it? "So, how do you sell your labor?"

I always ask that because I find it correlates with their personality

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