Comment by iamleppert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamleppert | Hacker News Reader

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I consider myself to be an intellectual and naturally introverted. I, like the OP, had at one point in my life written parties off (really any free-form social interaction where there wasn’t some topic, purpose or structure). I thought I was too important for small talk, it “bored me” and I enjoyed doing other things so why bother? Why subject myself to something I don’t enjoy? It seems so reasonable and logical on the surface.

Then something changed for me, I went to a party and actually tried to talk to people. I approached it like the challenge of learning a new skill or technology. If you appear “bored” in a conversation people pick up on it quickly — they too are likely going through the same set of emotions. The challenge is to keep a conversation going long enough and authentically enough to develop a comfort with the other person, once you do that you can talk freely and people “open up”. They will tell you things that are actually interesting and small talk will be no more. When this occurs, it’s (at least for me) the exact same feeling as getting into a good book, hours can pass without you knowing it.

When I hear someone complain about hating small talk, it’s a sign of their own naivety and the irony is that the thing they most crave —- meaningful, intelligent human interaction is possible with virtually anyone and right there in front of them the entire time. Why go home and read a book when you have a person with a life’s worth of experiences and stories right there in front of you?

The older you get the more you realize that the opportunity for social interactions like these decreases over time. There’s a finite number of them for everyone, they are not some unlimited quantity or resource and for most people the number is quite a bit smaller than the time you have (and will have) alone for intellectual pursuits.

> Then something changed for me, I went to a party and actually tried to talk to people. I approached it like the challenge of learning a new skill or technology.

This is pretty inspiring/challenging.

> Why go home and read a book when you have a person with a life’s worth of experiences and stories right there in front of you?

It's easier .. but then, I don't complain about being socially inept either

I must say I want to give you some support! One could start to think about the audience on HN when one sees this thread where so many people are disagreeing with you, when you are so obviously right.

Just like you say, that it is much more likely, that the author is missing social skills, one could now make a similarly baseless claim: "Most likely you have over time become less sharp and less of an intellectual, so that you now accept the useless small talk and accept wasting time." Just to give you in impression of how it might feel, what you wrote about the author. So lets just stop assuming things about the author.

Out of some people, you will not get any original ideas, interesting thoughts. It is you, who needs to push them towards any interesting topic and even then they might derail it into unimportance or uninteresting ways. Yes, a person is in front of you, with a whole life experience, but there are questions to be considered, when comparing to a book:

(1) Is that person in front of you able to communicate and share any meaningful information from that whole life of experiences? Have they thought about stuff in depth before, so that they can share some quintessence in the short time, that you talk with them, before the conversation walks on to more lighthearted topics with the next person at the table?

(2) In a meaningful book, the author has firstly recognized, that there is something meaningful to write about, something to share. This might not be the case for a random person at a party. The person at the party might not even know, that anything they experienced is worth sharing or what those things are.

(3) Hopefully a good book will be written with carefully chosen words, that most precisely convey the ideas, that they author had. It is very difficult to achieve anything close to that in some small talk.

(4) Who is willing to lend you their ear and talk for prolonged duration on a party, when there are probably many other people around? That already is some precondition, which might not be fulfilled at any random party.

Maybe I’m young but I genuinely feel like I’ve never met someone I couldn’t learn from even if they cannot communicate their life experience in a way I would consider intelligent. Undereducated people have their own speech and their own communication style, and a lifetime of struggle that I haven’t had in talking that I would greatly enjoy learning about.

Often times books are only written by people that are highly educated, middle to upper class if not rich, literate, and considered acceptable by the publishing machine. Also, people who publish books are largely white (and the publishing machine is also largely white). This limits your ability to appreciate and learn from the incarcerated, the working class and below, single mothers, people with addiction, lower class immigrants, and the disabled.

This line of discussion seems like elitism and close mindedness to me, but again, I might just be so young (I’m not yet 30) that I don’t have enough life experience to know what it’s like to go to a party and find no one with anything interesting to say.

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