I’m an introvert and I don’t like small talk.

I don’t take pleasure in chatting about the weather, news, sports, the condos they’re building down the street and other miscellaneous topics.

I make small talk all the time but I find as I get older, it’s becoming more and more mindless fluff.

As a mom, this realization has magnified since my attention span and patience for bullshit is always running low.

My husband and I recently started watching “Mad Men” and during one of the first few episodes, Don Draper and his wife, Betty, are having drinks with his boss and his wife.

They were discussing how Don’s boss had a nanny and he grew up fine. Then Don’s boss asks if he ever had a nanny.

He avoids the question and jokingly states that it would

“ruin the first half of [his] novel.”

I started thinking about how Don reacted and how this show was based in the 1960s.

It is now 2018 and whenever I’m at a social outing, I still do the same thing. I don’t talk about those personal details and others don’t either.

Why?

I’m an introvert and so it takes energy for me to be around new people and to make conversation.

It’s not like I’m depleted after the interactions; I just wish the conversation would go straight to the real stuff.

What Do Introverts Want To Talk About?

We want to get to know people, to have meaningful interactions, to understand the human experience through their eyes.

We want to hear your life stories and your history of how they came to be.

We want to know where you came from and where you want to go.

We want to know the decisions you’ve made, why you made them, whether it worked out in the end and what decisions you are contemplating now.

We want to know why you got into their field of work and whether you love or hate their job.

We want to know how you grew up.

Did they have a nanny?

Did they go to daycare?

How do they think it affected how they are as an adult?

We want to know how you were as a child and how or if you’ve changed.

We want to know why you live where they live and if you could live anywhere else, where that would be.

We want to know your bucket lists, your past successes and failures and what you learned from them.

Funny Thing About The Internet

The thing about the Internet is that there are thousands of people who blog about these topics every single day.

People (myself included) aren’t afraid of writing their deepest, most personal thoughts and feelings and publishing them to the world. People take pictures in bed and post them on Instagram.

People put pictures of their children playing in their living room on Facebook.

People put up vlogs on YouTube and show how clean/messy their homes are.

We can find out so much about another person without ever meeting them once.

We can spend a whole day on my phone as a spectator, stalking other peoples’ lives, viewing what they want to put out for others to see.