Why Does Everything Important Feel Like Nothing?

I used to be a master of small talk. I could spend 15 minutes chatting with a person about absolutely nothing. Zero words of importance exchanged, but a rapport would be established, and all of it was built from pleasantries and observations about the weather. These days I can still talk endlessly about the weather. The problem is that now I have really strong feelings about it, and I’ll probably infodump on whatever poor soul raises the topic with me. There are very few safe subjects left once you’ve developed opinions.

Maybe it’s because most of my coworkers just bleat, caw, or quack rather than talk. Or maybe we’re living in a world where small talk itself is dying. Millennials love to roast Gen Z for buffering IRL, but what I’m talking about is bigger than that.

When the moment calls for small talk, I run out of material fast. My brain locks up. When I’m talking, I can hear myself desperately trying to keep a conversation alive, which only makes me more aware of how badly it’s going. And it’s hard to gauge whether it’s me or the whole world. Why is it so hard to make small talk?

I once read an article about a study by the sociologist Patrick Sharkey that found that Americans now spend an extra 99 minutes a day at home compared to 2003. Those 99 minutes are just enough time to avoid several people per day. The trend started long before the pandemic, exploded when the pandemic hit, and never came back down.

I know my own version of that trend by heart. I left Washington, D.C., for Vermont in 2018. In 2020, I started doing my office job from home. By the start of 2022, I was working from home for myself full time — farm stuff, videos, writing. I removed, one by one, every situation where I used to practice talking to people I didn’t particularly need to talk to. My small talk skills were decimated.

But the small talk did something, and lately I’m realizing that something is lacking without it. Small talk was how you got from stranger to acquaintance to the buddy who plows your driveway just for the hell of it. All that BS about vacations did a job. A functioning community requires a certain amount of hearing about somebody else’s cruise. The conversation could be meaningless even when the relationship it was secretly building wasn’t.

That’s the magic trick of the small things. They do big stuff. The church-basement meeting about culverts, the dinner-bath-teeth-bed routine, the chitchat about nothing-all-that-important is important. Things can feel trivial from inside the life that requires you to do them, even when they are enormously important from outside it.

So maybe the world really is worse at small talk these days. And maybe I’ve become even worse than that. I can complain that we don’t talk to each other anymore, but I’m the one who built a life where I rarely have to.

I went all over the state this week doing interviews for this new documentary. It’s going to be a good one this week.

Here in Vermont, our primary elections are on Tuesday. Check out this late, breaking video I made on the topic.