The Philosophy of Small Talk

I’ve never been good at it.

Small talk.
Idle words traded like pocket change, meant to buy just enough silence to keep us from slipping into something too real.
“How’s your day?”
“Busy.”
“Weather’s been weird lately.”
“Yeah, climate change or something.”

No one means anything they say. Not really. And yet we say it anyway, like incantations to ward off the ghosts of intimacy.

I find myself participating out of habit. Not because I enjoy it, but because I don’t know how not to. Because answering “How are you?” with “I don’t know, I haven’t felt like myself in months” is too much honesty for a hallway or a checkout line.

But what is small talk, really?
A dance? A mask? A form of mercy?
Maybe it’s all three.

We’ve been trained to speak without saying, to connect without touching. Politeness as performance. Distance as default. We ask about the commute, not the chaos. We mention the new restaurant, not the quiet ache in our chest that hasn’t left since December.

Sometimes I wonder if all this chitchat is just a safer way of asking:
“Will you stay if I show you the real me?”
“Do you have space for what I’m not saying?”

And maybe that’s why it exists.
Because the world is too sharp, and most people are already bleeding quietly.
Small talk is the gauze we wrap around the wound so we can keep moving.

But there are moments—fleeting ones—where something breaks through. A crack in the script.

Like when someone says “I’m tired” and means more than lack of sleep.
Or when laughter falters mid-sentence and suddenly there's silence, real silence, not the awkward kind but the fragile kind that asks:
Are we still pretending? Or can we stop now?

Those are the moments I live for.
The unsaid, the almost-said, the spaces between.

Because the truth is, we are all desperate to be known.
But we are terrified of being seen.

So we begin with “Nice weather today.”
And maybe, just maybe, if the ground feels steady enough, we dare to say something truer.

Like:
“I miss someone.”
“I’m scared.”
“I don’t know who I am anymore.”

But not today.
Today, it’s just small talk.
And maybe that’s enough.

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