Talking to people

[jack]

I'm getting better at chatting to strangers on the train, provided they want to talk about the Riemann Hypothesis and guaranteed basic income.

But I still want to get better at finding topics of conversation intermediate between "nice weather, isn't it?" and "so, lets argue about politics and god, and lets talk about set theory". Any suggestions for finding interesting but not-too-contovertial topics, if I'm talking to friends or acquaintances and don't want to force them to carry the conversation?

Comments

[rmc28]

books, films and tv shows ...

[ceb]

I find films & TV are particularly easy to start conversations on due to the way there's a limited number of them at any one time and they're time limited, which means you can say "oh have you seen X that was on recently" and that's a very natural conversation starting line. OTOH I tend to be quite behind on what's currently on. Books and music can also be fruitful but with a stranger it's harder to hit on an overlap you can both talk about (unless they luckily happen to be on a train reading a thing you've also read).

[wild_irises]

I was going to say movies and TV also (movies go far even with strangers). Also pets. Also interesting odd bits in the news, not (or at least not very) political. Also, things seen out the window.

[jack]

I think I struck gold hearing a cute couple talking discussion a novel about the Riemann Hypothesis[1] :)

[1] Apparently it's not *very* about the Riemann hypothesis, but I don't think any other novel I've read has even mentioned it :)

[mair_in_grenderich]

what book?

[jack]

http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf1113

The Humans by Matt Haig. When I looked it up, the Riemann hypothesis seemed to be more of a MacGuffin than a relevant part of the plot, so I was less excited to read it, but I was still pleased :)

[mair_in_grenderich]

cool :)

[corrvin]

Seconded, this is the real reason to watch TV.

[jack]

Yeah, it's useful to have something *recent* so it's a more natural topic of conversation. I don't like having to schedule my life round TV, but I do enjoy watching things within a couple of days of a release schedule.

[corrvin]

Oh, also, if you're going to discuss entertainment, be aware of what I was horrified to discover the other day: some people don't do meta.

Me: About that series you find interesting, I was thinking about $VAMPIRE_SERIES_PREMISE and I realized that $EXTRAPOLATION, wouldn't that be interesting? And $SCENE seems to support that. Wouldn't that be fun to watch?

Other person: Well there's no such thing as vampires. So they just write whatever they want.

And then I just kind of... slink away while looking blank.

[jack]

be aware of what I was horrified to discover the other day: some people don't do meta.

Yes! I mean, that's totally fine, "more abstract" is not always automatically wiser or more interesting. But also, I resent feeling like I'm stupid for thinking about the implications of something, when blatantly, people DO judge fiction by implicit rules[1.

[1] Just try making a detective show that doesn't resolve the murder subthread or a romantic comedy that doesn't show who the lead gets together with at the end of the film, and see how "it has magic in, anything can happen" isn't actually true, even if people mean it when they say it.

[gerald_duck]

I believe "did you see the match last night?" is traditional. I'm not sure small talk is really my thing.

geraldinegoose's grandfather asked a women at a party what she thought of the price of giraffes. With considerable success. Though you're already married, so might want to refrain from giraffe-related conversational gambits, to be on the safe side.

[jack]

I believe "did you see the match last night?" is traditional.

And the traditional response is "Yes, but the ref sure didn't!" :)

[chess]

Topics of conversation I notice working with some success:

1) Complaining (or enthusing!) about work. Everyone likes to have a good moan and most people go to some kind of employment which isn't 100% awesome all the time. If it is 100% awesome they probably want to tell you about the cool thing they did at work.

2) Talking about a hobby, ideally a shared one, but even a non-shared one; I've had a reasonable amount of success repeating the Layman's Guide To LARP to marginally interested parties and receiving the Layman's Guide to Knitting or Gardening or Sportsball in return.

3) Talking about someone's children, ideally in a positive light. It often ends up with the other party carrying the conversation if they have children, but everyone's at least _been_ a child and hence has something to contribute.

4) Talking about health conditions / Minor Medical Mishaps. Obviously this can occasionally stray into areas as sensitive as politics/god/set theory, or feel like whining, but often people like to play sympathy tennis / relate to common health-related experiences. This can sometimes also lead to talking about exercise / fitness although that is also sometimes sensitive.

[eudoxiafriday.wordpress.com]

Food! Can be sensitive / need to avoid diet talk, but enthusing about food in general or talking about historical food ("when I was small my Mum made the *best* birthday cakes ...") is something I've found to work well with lots of different people. Stuff like "Have you heard of any good places for X cuisine? My parents are visiting next month and like that kind of thing." (When work lunchtime conversation gets too heavy, a few of us start talking about cake/enthusing about food instead. Though now that I've brought a crossword book in we do the crossword instead :) )

[seryn]

A lot of the stuff you discuss here wouldn't be horrible. Like the date thing, "Americans call today 'pi day'...."

You have two competing goals. One is to interact with more people. The other is to continue being yourself. The friction is that a lot of people aren't really going to mesh well if you're not homogenized with everyone else. So you need something approachable but still you.

There are a lot of people who aren't going to be worth more than 3 sentences of your time. Those are the, "Glad I caught the train today! with this weather, I wouldn't have wanted to be on my bike." And if they're still talking, road construction.

But I'm probably not the best person for this. I joined a Meetup and managed to talk about Teen Wolf fanfic with someone who has a religious tattoo. (That fandom is almost entirely m/m. It's quite likely that someone who has a religious tattoo will have a problem with TV, werewolves, or slash. And the guy was nice about it, he raised his arm like stretching but it bared his tattoo so I stopped talking. He deliberately changed the topic in a fairly obvious way.) But I didn't start there. I started with the locale-based stuff, the weather, the what do you do reflections (to dodge that myself), the local food choices, the likelihood of this event recurring, etc. It was good enough that no one hated me out of a group of 8 strangers.