“If You Could Have Any Superpower, What Would It Be?”

My unlikely go-to topic of conversation

Ross Stringer
6 min readJan 7, 2024
Photo by Julia Filirovska on Pexels

I attended a fair number of meet-up events in 2023.

When I approached someone for a conversation (or vice versa), their first question to me tended to be, what do you do?

I really didn’t like that question, to be honest. It wasn’t their fault, mind, because such a question is a pretty standard one to get the ball rolling. However, I didn’t like the opening salvo of a conversation to regard my job title.

That’s why I preferred, what do you like to do for fun?

A turn of events

Once, I had a conversation with someone at one of these meet-ups about the very notion of asking standard questions.

One of the first things this individual said to me (and the group of people I was with) was along the lines of, “have you noticed that most conversations here always open up with one’s occupation? Why don’t we think of a different topic to open with?

So feeling smart, I tried my then usual, “what do you like to do for fun?”.

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Ross Stringer

Writes on philosophy, psychology, self-improvement, the writing lifestyle, and the weird and wonderful aspects of life that are not appreciated enough.