Hacker News Reader

Comment by notauser | Hacker News Reader

It's hard not to talk about the most dominant thing in your life, and only a few people have the skill of being genuinely interested in the priorities of other people.

Some people are boring about their hobbies, some are boring about people, some are boring about work, some are boring about their kids.

If you find the conversation boring just remember they are probably just as bored at you droning on about blockchain or whatever it is you are keen to talk about.

View on HN

This is a fair point. Taking it further, I also think it may just be that people with kids find "kid talk" to be a good default, safe topic of conversation with other people who have kids, so 50% or more of cases it actually makes them more interesting to those other kid-having people they can bond and empathize with.

Whereas I, who am not interested in that stuff, end up mentally putting them all into a single "boring" bucket, while the guy who can't stop talking about his 24-pack of Soylent gets his own separate "boring" bucket.

> 50% or more of cases

Definitely 'or more'. Something like 85% of adults 35+ have children. It's a pretty reliable low-effort conversation starter that immediately gets you a point of commonality with someone.

I don't have kids, but am involved in the lives of young relatives and am generally interested in questions about how to raise a child in ways that lead to them being competent, well adjusted humans. To me, parent talk seems to fall into two broad categories: discussions about raising children in general, and anecdotes about some supposedly funny thing that a particular child did last week. The former I find interesting, and I can engage in these conversations for hours. The latter bores me to death (and when the child being described is present I actively try to derail the conversation, as I hated listening to embarrassing stories about myself as a child and imagine most children feel the same way even if they lack the courage to voice that opinion to their parents). This is the difference between discussing the mechanics of a blockchain and discussing some anecdote about Coinye West rebranding as Coinye. I'm not too knowledgeable about or even particularly interested in cars, but I can listen to a mechanic talk about different types of engines and be genuinely engaged. I can't be genuinely engaged by somebody talking about the new paint job they put on their muscle car last week. I can recognise that others seem more engaged by anecdotal narratives than discussions of underlying systems, but I still think this distinction is different than simply being interested in one broad topic like "children" or "blockchains" over another.

It's just random small talk. It's the equivalent of talking about goofy stuff you run across at work. Or that you really like programming language X for <these subjective reasons>. A lot of people use sports for this too.

A good portion of the discussions on even this website are on the level of "I painted my car red last weekend". The articles are oftentimes better than this, but not always. Any fashionable piece of tech tends to have articles devoid of intellectual effort. E.g. back when NoSQL first came around, or just about any article about microservices.

Huh, I have the opposite opinion. For context. I am relatively young in the workforce, and also don't have kids nor immediate plans to have any.

I find general discussions about child development less interesting than humorous personal antidotes while parenting. Specifically when talking to my coworkers over lunch. Kids do stupid things, and hearing about the stupid things of the newest generation from my coworkers perspective can be a fun and interesting break from software engineering work we usually engage in. Where as a technical (some might say "deep") discussion about parenting and child development as a process feels more similar to the stuff I already grind at day to day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com