Part 2 of the "cultural games I don't want to participate in" series

Small Talk

I can shoot the proverbial shit, I just don't like it. It's not the case that I don't want to talk to people, I actually enjoy it quite a lot. I just want conversations to be more meaningful.

I'm supposed to believe that when someone asks "How are you" the culturally appropriate response is "Fine, and you?". People don't want to know about my back problems or the stress resulting from my lack of sleep or missing my loved one. This is true in a lot of cultures. I guess in Korea the typical greeting is "where are you going?" and the socially appropriate response is "that way", where the demonstrative 'that' actually has no specified referent. After all, who wants to know that you're headed to the proctologist, except, maybe, the proctologist?

Certainly, I agree that there should be some kind of limit to the amount of information that is exchanged in short encounters. These limits should be set by the level of the relationship between the two participants. I just happen to be more permitting of this level with respect to complete strangers.

Let's just assume that these conversation are to remain as meaningless as possible. I'd like to propose, then, a completely new topic of small talk which should replace weather-talk, sports-talk, and traffic/public transport-talk.

Wikipedia articles.

Before starting out each day, hit the random article link on wikipedia's website. Read it in as much detail as time allows, and then begin all consequent small talk with the phrase "I read on wikipedia that X". Then the goal is to use up the small talk time by engaging the other person into the most bizarre yet topical conversation possible.