It helps to have canned fallback responses. Mine is “I know, right?” in a dry/sarcastic tone. It works for any comment and most questions, because it’s a meaningless affirmation
It even works when you fumble, it’s so vague you can use it to reply to a question and recover
The issue is that the conversation usually falls falt if the only thing you offer is that kind of empty response. And I’m pretty bad at finding a middle ground between responses that are too negative (my life tends to be kinda shit compared to most people’s) or too deep and responses that are too meaningless even for small talk (like talking about the weather).
Fair… When people ask me how I am I say I can’t complain, because I can’t… It’s not socially acceptable
You can have canned questions too, but I find that makes the whole thing feel even more empty. Personally, I like to talk about the weather not being normal, or about store prices rising and such. Just little observations that any sane person would agree is both true and a problem
It’s my own version of checking if they’ll make friendly noises… If you can’t acknowledge the world is falling apart or think Trump is going to magically fix it, we don’t have the common ground to keep talking. I’d rather sit there in awkward silence
I think a lot of social situations become easier once you flip it around and ask what outcome you want out of it.
Maybe it’s ok to have deeper small talk. Maybe when people don’t respond with friendly noises, they’ve failed your friendliness test
I see the value in it, I just suck at it.
It helps to have canned fallback responses. Mine is “I know, right?” in a dry/sarcastic tone. It works for any comment and most questions, because it’s a meaningless affirmation
It even works when you fumble, it’s so vague you can use it to reply to a question and recover
The issue is that the conversation usually falls falt if the only thing you offer is that kind of empty response. And I’m pretty bad at finding a middle ground between responses that are too negative (my life tends to be kinda shit compared to most people’s) or too deep and responses that are too meaningless even for small talk (like talking about the weather).
Fair… When people ask me how I am I say I can’t complain, because I can’t… It’s not socially acceptable
You can have canned questions too, but I find that makes the whole thing feel even more empty. Personally, I like to talk about the weather not being normal, or about store prices rising and such. Just little observations that any sane person would agree is both true and a problem
It’s my own version of checking if they’ll make friendly noises… If you can’t acknowledge the world is falling apart or think Trump is going to magically fix it, we don’t have the common ground to keep talking. I’d rather sit there in awkward silence
I think a lot of social situations become easier once you flip it around and ask what outcome you want out of it.
Maybe it’s ok to have deeper small talk. Maybe when people don’t respond with friendly noises, they’ve failed your friendliness test