why small talk sucks

Have you ever struggled with small talk? This seemingly simple form of communication has always been a mystery to me. Why are chats about the weather or repetitive texts asking "wyd" so important? In this video, Sabrina learns why small talk exists by challenge herself to talk to a bunch of strangers.

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SOCIAL MEDIA
Sabrina
Melissa
Taha

CREDITS
Produced by Sabrina Cruz
Video Editing by Vicky Moonan
Motion Design by Sabrina Cruz
Thank you to Jayde, Anjelica, Lorien, Noor, Aaron, Jo, Xuan, Austin, and Jake for chatting with me. Hopefully we aren't strangers anymore :)

MUSIC

RECOMMENDED READING
Why small talk is so excruciating (2019) by David Roberts via Vox

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Sabrina is QuiRkY
01:08 The Self-Help Hole of Research
01:42 Why Small Talk Exists
04:01 Three Ways to Get Better at Small Talk
05:08 Science? I don't know her.
06:35 Just realized I mispelled spreadsheet.
06:42 Sabrina remembers she has an anxiety disorder
09:48 Conclusions, conversions, and statistical insignificance
12:00 Please share this video with someone you want to small talk with
12:16 Paying the bills
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Welcome to the joke under the fold! A word of warning regarding small talk:
Be careful including cheesy jokes during small talk, someone might me laughtose intolerant!
Leave a comment with the word LAUGH to let me know you were here ;-)

[answerinprogress]

I hope you liked that video! *Do you have a favourite conversation topic?* Leave a comment down below.

[itsgabibelle]

I love how professional your videos are whilst utilizing sentences like: “this yeeted me down a rabbit hole of self help”

[aaryakulkarni]

No one:
Sabrina: Let's do the thing I hate for a day straight instead of making book reports.

[IceMetalPunk]

"Do you think koalas should exist?" "Have you ever held a brain?"

....are you *sure* this counts as small talk? 😂

[keithgehman]

I feel like every conversation in my head is always more interesting than my real conversations

[Gleepicus]

"Saying the same thing in different fonts." That is in my brains reference library now.

[thanhthongdang]

Small talk was invented by William Small in 1765. Before then, people would just stare at each other in absurd silence.

[AntonWongVideo]

Being extroverted and having anxiety is like being lactose intolerant and loving cheese
yes, it is hell

[narayananmohan]

You also need to consider this as an additional factor in why you enjoyed it: willing participants.
You were speaking with people who were associated with you through a second or third degree of freedom, and were willing participants in conversation - they were curious, as you were, if not about the same things.
But where small talk becomes tedious and terrible is when you have people who aren't inclined to talk with you.
Through your experiment, you managed to "clear" one of the filtering steps that you would normally have had to deal with in other scenarios. In that regard, Omegle was closer to producing real-world-like interactions: 2 seconds and you're already mentally checked out and want to run away. XP

But glad that you enjoyed the process :)
Its definitely hard to talk to strangers, even WITH these parameters and filters in place. So, well done. :)

[AshleyBromiley]

Getting to know someone isn't small talk. Small talk is talking to that coworker you hardly know who happens to be in the kitchen when you want to heat up your lunch and you do not care about but they insist on asking you how you're doing even though they don't care about you either.

[lightsoda]

Small talk is only an issue when one individual cannot recognize the other's desire to leave.

[Aeuriga]

One of the best pieces of advice I ever heard, and which always comes back to me when chatting with new folks, is: Don't interact with someone as if you need to convince them to be your friend - treat them as if they already are.

[edenassos]

If you want to curb small talk, ask the other person extremely personal questions like how many times they poop a day and whether it's hard or soft. They'll stop talking to you.

[azerim]

I think you mostly just skipped small talk and went straight into getting to know each other.

[wiczus]

I think people who go ahead and make the conversation: "what you doing?" "not much, you?" "not much." are terrible at small talk. You do need SOME hook. You can at least awnser your own question in some detail, like "I was cleaning my room all day". The information is not that interesting to me, but it gives me something to work with.

[pufflemaster]

Just got here, some of these section names are gold

[Lily-wddz]

I see small talk as a easy way of testing if a stranger wants to have a conversation when I don't know. Its pretty much an invitation for someone to talk. If I ask them how their day was or if they did anything fun over the weekend and they give me a bland, "its okay" answer, then I know they don't want a conversation. If I ask them and they actually give me something to go off of, then we can start a conversation without one of us awkwardly saying something out of nowhere. As much as I would sometimes want to I'm probably not going to walk up to some random and ask, "How do you feel about, *Insert random obscure topic here*" unless we are both in a situation which gives me a topic to talk about. It helps to have some level of buildup and sometimes small talk can do that.

[yonicorn]

What really puts me off with small talk is that my anxiety always makes me feel like the other person doesnt care about my stuff and what I'm gonna say, like i think "oh I'm gonna tell them about my outfit" and my mind goes "wtf no one cares shut up"

[MadsAboutYou]

Is it still small talk when you start talking about personal things? I always thought small talk was basically synonymous with talking about generic things as like an extended greeting. Most of the video seems focused on conversing in general.

[CrescentMond]

So, this is basically me as a preteen autistic person going: Ok, I need to understand how people comunicate and do small talk because otherwise everyone looks at me strange. Without a spreadsheet tho, I was 11 and without a PC (and smartphones weren't a thing yet)... but yeah, this is the kind of "research" I did on everyone around me