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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3619 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 25, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Am I the only one who just doesn't know how to answer "What are you hobbies, or what do you do?"

I usually respond with joke answers such as "I'm homeless, so mostly heroin" or "I research about Elephants". If they honour my advanced sense of humour by laughing at that I usually give the real answer, if they don't then they don't need to know my hobbies anyways.

It's not that I don't have hobbies, I do. But I just feel like there is no way to answer that question without sounding like a tool or that answer having no information value at all.

Yes, I want to signal that I am a special snowflake. I don't merely go on walks, go to the gym, cook, program, I do those things better than everyone else. I go on walks to unknown areas without a GPS in remote places far from home I have never been to, I kill myself at the gym everyday only doing compound movements, I cook with the rarest ingredients, I program with PEP8 in mind. Only Half joking here.

Of course the main mistake I could be making is that I am assuming this question holds a lot of weight in the first impression, and that its just not small-talk. However, I do tend to be somewhat judgy with peoples responses, maybe I shouldn't extrapolate that expectation reversed onto others? And drop the "judginess", I should know by now that words coming out of someones mouth has (informational) little value being the norm.

But I just feel like there is no way to answer that question without sounding like a tool or that answer having no information value at all.

Yes, I want to signal that I am a special snowflake. I don't merely go on walks, go to the gym, cook, program, I do those things better than everyone else.

This is not something I think a lot about, but it's something I happen to have been thinking about recently due to an exchange I had in the old SSC sub. The thought I had at the time was:

...hobbies don't exist for you to be good at them. Hobbies exist for you to enjoy. Being good at things can enhance their enjoyment! But not always. If you like any of those things, then do them and don't worry about getting good (you may find, eventually, that you get good anyway). If you don't like doing those things, then the desire to be good at them is more like generic envy than anything else. I certainly envy people who are great artists, at some level, but I don't actually enjoy making art enough that I am willing to sit around being bad at it for hours on end.

The idiomatic "what do you do?" is like, level 2 small talk. If level 0 is "I accidentally made eye contact with a stranger in the grocery store so I'm going to slightly nod my head with a flat smile," and level 1 is "some weather we're having, eh?" then "what do you do?" is an invitation to become acquainted, in the sense of becoming acquaintances. It's the first step to finding some connection or commonality beyond momentarily shared physical space. And yes, it is natural to wish to be impressive in such moments, especially if you're hoping to develop the relationship to level 3 small talk (friends relating recent but otherwise trivial experiences) or beyond (I don't know what level "married people small talk" is, but it's up there somewhere).

But jumping straight to "I program with PEP8 in mind" may actually discourage further conversation, if they don't know (or care) what PEP8 is. This is what might be called the autist's mistake--answering a question literally instead of using the opportunity to signal interest (or lack of interest) in further conversation. Level 2 small talk proceeds as a series of proffered openings. For example, "I'm a programmer" can be met with

  • "oh, I'm also a programmer, what do you program?" (meaning, "aha! we have something in common, it will be more interesting for us both to get a bit deeper than that")

or

  • "oh, I'm a banker myself, I don't know much about code" (meaning, "alas, I will not find that topic interesting, perhaps you will find this topic interesting?")

Whereas "I program with PEP8 in mind" offers a narrower choice:

  • "hey, PEP8, nice" (meaning, "I know what that is, are you now as impressed with me as you thought I would be impressed with you?")

or

  • "PEP8, huh?" (meaning, "oh, is this a dominance contest? I should either show off my superior knowledge of something else, or just find an excuse to talk to someone else")

That you recognize the possibility of "sounding like a tool" suggests you grasp the problem reasonably well, but I think you've been too quick to dismiss simpler answers as "having no information value at all." The information people are seeking first, when making small-talk, is not exactly the same as the information they have explicitly requested, but that doesn't mean there is no value in it. The first piece of information you have to establish with others is whether you are mutually interested in developing a relationship (even just as acquaintances). Delivering a low-resolution picture of yourself, initially, allows others to decide whether they want to know more. And once they want to know more, you can give them a higher-resolution picture without sounding like a tool.

Or in other words--stop trying to impress everyone. Keeping yourself out of naked dominance contests will actually enable you to win dominance contests by default down the line.

(I myself have incredibly "basic"--in the most adolescent, pejorative sense--geek hobbies. Where I get to feel like a special snowflake is after I've established myself as fulfilling several low-value stereotypes, while showing great interest in the things others do. It helps them feel superior to me, which softens the blow and helps me to appear humble (I am not, in fact, humble) when they inevitably discover that my education, employment, family situation, etc. is actually quite enviable, in stark violation of the expectations they'd established of me. This is deliberate on my part--sociologists long ago found that the people we tend to like the most are people who we started out not liking, who later succeeded in changing our opinion of them. Conversely, the people we like the least are people who we started out liking, who later lost our good opinion. People who you like and merely continue liking, or who you dislike and continue disliking, will rarely be your most- or least-liked acquaintances, respectively. There is probably a name for the phenomenon but I no longer remember what it is. Anyway in my experience this also works with people's estimations of social value.)

I’m interested in your codification of the levels of small talk. Was that spur-of-the-moment, or is it from somewhere?

Entirely inspired by @f3zinker's post, in fact, and completely original to me here.

Google suggests I'm far from the first to think along these lines, though at a glance most of the articles out there are "levels of conversation" or "levels of communication" that put "small talk" at the bottom--or they are lists about making "better" small talk. Analytically, talk is "small" when it is about "unimportant or uncontroversial matters, especially as engaged in on social occasions" (via Oxford) but the Wikipedia article suggests there are scholars who have explored the subject more deeply (including some culture war inroads on gender and culture differences in small talk).

I may be breaking the analytic concept a little by suggesting attention to "small talk" at different levels of relationship, since most discussions of "small talk" frame it as taking place between strangers or acquaintances rather than between friends or intimates--as Wikipedia suggests that "small talk" especially "helps new acquaintances to explore and categorize each other's social position." But I do think something plausibly characterized as "small talk" occurs frequently between friends and intimates, so I felt like it was probably worth thinking about the matter more inclusively.

That pairs well with my understanding of friendship levels, and how they're all qualitatively different, not just differing in amount of friendship.

  1. Acquaintances have shared attributes,

  2. Friends have shared experiences, and

  3. Intimates (ohana, family and found family) have shared purpose.

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