Daily Reflections

01/06/2022

Overthinking Someone Else’s Politeness

It is an absolute oddity when you take a question the wrong way. As is the point at which you realize you have done so. Someone asks you how you are doing? If you are at all like I am, the initial reaction, as well as the subsequent response can range from “I’m good thanks.” To “I’ve got this crick in my neck which is making me rethink whether or not our physical bodies are even real.” And several potentially weirder points in-between.

Generally speaking, my subconscious does its calculus in the background and factors in all the variables (With whom am I speaking? Have we had deeper levels of conversation that might warrant a more substantive answer? Does the asker seem in a mood to banter about any more than a superficial acknowledgement? Do they know something about me? My current situation? Are they concerned or just nosey? Should they be concerned? Have any of my deeply personal struggles made there way out into some other conversation and then been used in a few rounds of the telephone game between this person and some other 6th degree of separation friend or acquaintance? What could that be? Are there others who know more about me than I’d like?

You get the idea, and as I stated, most of the time this math runs in the background. As it should. If it has not, then the proper response is usually spaced out long enough to birth some awkward moment in its place. At this point, it is best to answer in some manner and hope that anything pertinent will find another moment in the conversation to re-assert itself. When this happens, an entirely new math occurs which, to my knowledge is never subconscious and consequently not worked out as a complex linear equation, but rather, an anxious attempt at determining circumference.

Now, presently, I am not doing well, or at least, any answer to this simple question has changed in the moments since it was posed.

What now could have been avoided by simply offering a stock response (my Go-to is “I am very well thank you. And yourself?”) has spiraled into an existential hiccup that outweighs even the bit about that crick in my neck and whether or not it or I are real. Even that response would generate a discussion much easier to manage. But I am committed now to this exchange and the weight of only the first two sentences is already too much an encumbrance.

Is this why people stick to small talk? Would anything get accomplished in the world if everyone’s first conversation of the day went this way? Culture-wide analysis paralysis. The people who master small talk would be the one-eyed kings of the land where all are blinded by their own examinations. Perhaps they already are.

And somewhere along that line of thinking, I usually hear the other person uttering something that helps me realize we are still in this fledgling dialectic. Now, I must wonder if their waking experience of these words is as flummoxing as mine? If so, why aren’t we talking about that? Because we cannot speak nearly as fast as we think? Because to do so would be to tacitly admit that neither of us has a clue what is going on? Maybe that is what was really being asked. Not how am I doing, but how am I doing it at all?

And if that is the case, then my answer to the original question has again changed. In fact, the answer has been stripped of any relevancy at all; considering these new facts which we apparently are not to discuss, but instead paint over with a shade of brevity and politeness.

Then, I realize I have had this entire conversation in my head while still hearing about how my companion is “really good” and I haven’t managed to share any of this beyond a vacant look betraying my lack of attention and care for small talk. And then I feel rude despite that fact that I thought I was really trying to understand the other person.

That’s it. From now on, when asked how I am doing, I shall respond as thus:

You know…I am really not sure, let’s find out together.