I see more discourse about Small Talk around here lately than I ever thought I’d be seeing

and it gets me thinking about how my issue has never been that I don’t like small talk

but rather, that the gradient between “Small Talk” and “Deep Heavy Topics or Weird Nerdy Rambling” is… unclear to me

and I very VERY easily slide along that gradient too far, before I realize that I’m no longer in the place my conversation partner deems “Small”

and this can go both good and bad.

talking about “the weather” so easily can slide into a doom spiral about climate change. But it can also become a joyous autistic infodump about different classifications of cumulonimbus clouds

“did you see the new movie that came out” can VERY easily cross the bounds of small talk into realms as different as “omg we are both so feral about this I’m inviting you to my Discord fan server <3” and “UGH our views on this movie reveal that we are on such polar opposite ends of the political spectrum that we can now no longer even function as coworkers”

many ways you can break the delicate balance of how much info someone wants about “what did you do on the weekend.” If you bring up all the furry porn you drew, depending on the acquaintance that could be either the beginning of an amazing friendship or get the cops called on you

it’s not that small talk is bad, or good. it’s that it is part of a spectrum and no one can fully agree on where to draw lines on that spectrum that you shouldn’t cross. And the fluidity of conversation makes it a slippery place to even try to put lines on.