The Best Small-Talk Topic
The other day, a colleague came by my desk to chat about the weather. The sky outside was dark and menacing, and the meteorologists, she told me with widening eyes, were predicting gale-force winds, a fact that we both found intriguing (what even qualifies as a gale?). We were having a perfectly nice conversation at the end of a long day, from my perspective. And then she ruined it. “Sorry,” she said. “I know talking about the weather is boring.”
Many innocent people around the world suffer from this misapprehension.. But this stigma is based on a simple analytical error. In the paradigmatic example, two people, perhaps sharing an elevator or waiting for a bus, find themselves at a loss for what to talk about, but feel compelled to fill the air. One of them says, “It’s supposed to rain tonight.” Is that a boring scenario? Perhaps, although I must say that I, for one, would be grateful to learn about the forecast. But let’s think about what’s really happening. The problem here is not that the weather is boring. The problem is that the people have nothing else to talk about, and once the topic of the evening’s precipitation is exhausted, the conversation will sputter out awkwardly. Perversely, the weather becomes the symbol of a limited conversational repertoire, when it was in fact the most interesting subject available.
