I wonder if that's why some people are introverts, without even realising the cause.
I'll do small talk, but it's more boring than mowing the lawn with a pair of scissors. I find large gatherings completely boring, with nothing but noise involved because, well.. it's all just meaningless chatter.
Maybe some people aren't introverts, just "talking to more than a few people means this is dumb" verts.
> I'll do small talk, but it's more boring than mowing the lawn with a pair of scissors. I find large gatherings completely boring, with nothing but noise involved because, well.. it's all just meaningless chatter.
The trick I’ve found is to make the conversation more interesting, if you think it’s boring. 9 times out of 10 everyone is just jonesing for someone to take it somewhere fun, but afraid to make the first step. YOU can make that step.
Sometimes I ask people about their internal monologue, can they change its perceived voice? Do they even have one? That often sparks some interesting conversations.
> The trick I’ve found is to make the conversation more interesting, if you think it’s boring. 9 times out of 10 everyone is just jonesing for someone to take it somewhere fun, but afraid to make the first step.
Not in 2024. You're 100% going to get a person who's going to get offended and make a scene.
This is why I always go outside to hang out with the smokers at parties, even though I don’t smoke. The conversations are always more interesting in those small circles of 2-3 people who went outside for a cigarette than in the main party.
It is worse when story tellers come in and hog conversations. It is even worse worse when there are more than one and it is one upmanship on the war stories. Find this unpleasant and tiring. I prefer listening from more people.
My significant others' family we see several times a year has several such folks, and at least three of the top level people at the small company where I work are the same way. I've grown to be able to handle it much better than I could 20 years ago, but it's still deeply exhausting.
On a bad day it will drain my energy to the point where I truly lose most of my ability to function and need significant time to recover.
Yeah I dislike it when people always jump in with their experience rather than relating to the person who is talking.
I figured out that some people are "relators" and some people are "analyzers and askers" and it's usually the latter that is much more fun to talk to. But I know that two "relators" who seem to talk past each other often also seem to enjoy this method.
I concur, and this can be solved once you get the hang of actually creating a small bubble inside crowds and accept the FOMO of missing the rest of the event to have a quality conversation for a few hours.
Not everybody is made to ride a wave of people. But you can find a way to enjoy it in a different fashion. I find it true for a lot of situations, actually.
There's probably a certain unconference aspect to larger groups. (i.e. if something isn't working for you feel free to move on.) "This is really interesting but I really need to say hello to my friend over there who I haven't seen in ages." Of course, there's some art to politic transitions.
Same for me, in most situations I feel like 2 people (me included) is the perfect number, as I find it to be the only way for a conversation not to diverge from its pivotal argument ~2-3 minutes into it at maximun. Though sometimes when I feel more talkative 3 people is somewhat like a sweetspot, in disagreement with the article (for me personally) when the irl server reaches four it usually feels to me like a point of no return I wished we didnt get ourselves into.
I don't know if that's the reason but I couldn't agree more. The more people are in a group the more boring it tends to become for me too.
Maybe it's because it's more difficult to find shared topics of conversation. Or maybe people tend to avoid deeper topics because intimacy is lost. Or maybe there's some other group dynamic at play (family stuff etc).
I mean most people are just pretty boring. I find that people talk about:
Work (generally not a great idea at parties, maybe a bit more acceptable if it's hosted at work, or if you do something really unusual that others find interesting, and are able to talk about it in layman's terms).
Sports (I like sports well enough but am not passionate about any team or sport. I cannot add much to a conversation about specific players, games, coaches, statistics, strategy).
Wine, whiskey, tequila, food: See Sports, above.
Their kids or their vacations or other bragging. Nobody cares.
Reminiscing about some experience that a group of them had together. Hard to join in, if you're not part of that group or that experience.
Politics, conspiracies. Just no.
Interesting people who talk to people they don't already know are rare.
One useful trick is to treat each conversation as a game in which you have to discover the most interesting thing about the other person. Often, a conversation partner that seems boring is reserved, shy, or waiting for a social signal that it's okay to deviate from the topics you've listed (which can provide an 'in' to the really interesting stuff).
This is so interesting! I had this experience just a few weeks ago at a restaurant with a group of people where I talked about the most introverted and extroverted in the group, with another person who seemed to be introverted and that got them interested in talking a lot more just with me. It was so much more fun than listening to the 2 other loud people in the group.
There are 8 billion people whose "things" I am not interested in discovering. Why would I be interested in a random person's things just because they happened to be physically proximate?
Because "things" are interconnected. There's not just one definition of Thing, whatever your thing might be. There's your perspective on Thing, and there's other peoples' perspective on Thing. So, whatever it is, Thing is not something that you can understand in solitude.
Understanding it means understanding both your perspective on it, and other peoples' perspective on it, at the same time. That's most peoples' reason for wanting to interact with random people. They see it as an opportunity to refine their understanding of Thing, whatever it might be.
I think the easiest way to look at it is that you start with every topic available, then you filter down to what people are comfortable with. So, you can only ever lose topics as you add people, looking for the lowest common denominators.
I don't think this is true at all. If you have a bunch of engineers at the table, they have plenty of topics available, yes, but say you add a medical doctor to the mix, you've suddenly unlocked the topic of how the two professions compare, interact, overlap, etc. With just the engineers, you don't have that, outside of surface level speculation.
* 2 people is ideal for serious, deep conversation
* 3-4 is ideal for more humorous, relaxing conversation, but precludes the deepest intellectual topics