The main risk of conversation is making human contact.
Nobody wants that kind of discomfort.
We all want to be comfortable.
I hesitate to make any general statement ever at any time, but I feel entirely confident saying this one.
Comfort is universal.
Except, you know, if your hobby is walking across live coals. Or hanging from the ceiling by fishhooks. Or sword swallowing. Or if you’re a fan of the cult science fiction TV series Lexx. Or if you’re into one of the thousand and one other things that make most people cringe.
But even there, people justify it by explaining that it makes them feel like they fit in.
I can understand that.
I mean, I’m into some pretty strange stuff. I don’t care who knows it either. See, what I quite like to do, when I’m really in the mood for a good time, is impersonate a valet service. Only for an hour or two. There’s a hotel next door to where I work, so it’s okay. I like the little vests, and I get just the right amount of disdain from BMW owners to make me feel justified when I complain about them on the freeway. (“Your high-torque vehicle and your talent at driving do not coincide at all, sir or madame!” I have been known to say at times.)
So I understand it when people choose to seek their comfort in ways that wouldn’t work for me.
I’ve noticed, though, that for the most part everyone seems to be more comfortable with as little contact with other people as they can manage. Without literally going so far as to wrap themselves in wasp stingers and blare foghorns whenever somebody else begins to talk, people seem determined to hold other people at bay. They’re comfortable with only a certain amount of social contact. Say enough to determine that nobody in the immediate vicinity is actually mute, and beyond that people begin to get edgy.
That is, of course, a dangerous standard, even though we all have it. Because what if somebody nearby does turn out to be mute? You might be forced into a scenario where you will have to learn something new and interesting about a fellow human being, which, take it from me, is a thousand times worse than it sounds, even. This coming from somebody who has, for all intents and purposes, purged the social disability of curiosity almost entirely from his system.
The thing is, there seems to be a certain minimum amount of conversation that people expect in order to make that determination that everyone can go back to pretending that nobody else is there. There’s a difficulty, though, which is that nobody seems to know exactly how minimum that amount of conversation is.
If you read old books, it seems like there used to be a manual for this. Back when people made shirts out of starch and hats out of itch, people seemed to know how many words they had to exchange before beginning to ignore each other. I don’t know if it was all the book burnings in the ’70s or something, but whatever the reason we seem to have lost whatever instruction manual we used to have.
That’s a huge problem for a lot of us, because most of us have no clue what is the minimum socially acceptable amount of conversation.
Some of us have instincts to fall back on. We call those people sociopaths. But most of us are left in the frightening situation of relying on the other person we’re talking to. If they don’t know when the critical minimum is reached, then we might have to make a decision for ourselves! Think of it! The terror of independent thought! We can’t be having with that.
I’ve come up with a solution.
It’s pretty simple. Basically, what you do is think about something related to the conversation that could be construed as an invitation to deeper imaginative thought, and you say that as early as possible.
There are certain conversation topics that situations make obvious. If you’re on public transit, you talk about certain things. You talk about the meth heads you’ve met and how much people in traffic are idiots and, by default, you are smarter.
Those are acceptable topics that don’t flirt with the danger territories of personal interaction. The trouble with them is that you could talk about them for too long. You could pass into the dreaded recursive conversation loop, where you repeat the same banalities for an hour.
Or worse! You could inadvertently stumble into personal territory and break the sacred barriers!
There is hope for the sanctity of your calmness. In a situation like that, as soon as you sense the danger that you might be at risk of talking to somebody for more than the maximum amount of time your patience can endure — usually about a minute — you say something like, “Speaking of trains, I always feel like Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont’s reputation is a little overshadowed by James Watt. Don’t you agree?”
The strategy requires a little bit of study. You need to know a little bit about a wide variety of subjects, or be able to fake it anyway. If you do, you can summon up conversation segues on command.
With a little practice, I think anyone can master the art of cutting off conversations long before they even approach the depth of detail where you may risk the peril of the discomfort of human contact.
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