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

[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.