Common selfishness

Small talk. An essential tool for general human-to-human communication, yet constituting a type of mutual selfishness.

In the twenty seconds of downtime between when you first see your doctor and he decides to get on with his job, he might ask, "How are you?" to which you respond with one of the following.

"Good/fine/all right."

"Good/fine/all right, thanks."

"Good/fine/all right, thanks. Yourself?" (Warning: grammatically incorrect)

"Sick, obviously."

"Murderous."

It's likely that, with any positive reply, he'll smile and say, "That's good!" and with a negative, "Aw, that's too bad." And regardless, "How may I help you today?"

You see, from his perspective, he doesn't care that much. On the surface, he genuinely hopes you're well, that you get better; and he's genuinely pleased when your day's been a blast. Beyond that, however, he doesn't give a rat's ass. This isn't a bad thing, mind you. He simply doesn't have time for a lecture of, say, why your day's been so awesome. Heck, he doesn't even know you. From his perspective, he's filling in the silence with verbal acknowledgement of your presence.

Likewise, from your point of view, you know he doesn't care that much. You acknowledge that he hasn't got the time of day for details beyond "good" and "fine". And it's likely you don't want to waste your allocated fifteen minutes revealing personal information to someone you barely know. Furthermore, you know that he understands this. From your perspective, 'fine' is all but sufficient. For both of you.

In short, he doesn't care about you. You don't care that he doesn't care about you. Nothing needs to be said. Hand over the money and go. Common selfishness.

Fundamentally, it's always the same. But we're humans. We're relational. We have to bury the "I don't care-ness" as far down as possible. So far that even we, the very culprits with spades still brandished, are as unaware as any.

It happens naturally, and we change it up with our tone of voice. Perhaps my day's been rather depressing. Got a speeding ticket, cat threw up, internet stopped working, had to wake up before 8 - you know, genuine rich world problems. If someone asked, "How are you?" I might say, "Mm. Good?" with a rather high tone to indicate uncertainty. And with that, I've told them all they want to know; and I've been completely honest, too: "I haven't really got anything to complain about, but my day could have been better." All in two words. Common selfishness. Respect.

We do it all the time - adopting a tone to accommodate our given level of 'good'. And while some people are better at it than others, we're aware that our small talk is often teeming with all kinds of apathy. High or low, short or tall, no matter the tones of people you meet; if you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times. Mutual selfishness. You can go now.