Elfboy
Certified Sausage Smoker
- Joined
- Nov 26, 2008
- Messages
- 9,625
- MBTI Type
- ENFP
- Enneagram
- 5w4
- Instinctual Variant
- sx/sp
I think that all of this self-glorifying "I hate small talk" business is silly and missing the point. If you claim to hate small talk it's either because (1) you dislike (or don't want to be bothered with) communicating with others in general, (2) you are socially dysfunctional and want to blame it on other's lack of ability to converse about "deeper" things, or (3) because you're lying to make yourself seem N to idiots on this forum. Of these three possibilities, I think that only (1) can have any sort of correlation to personality type. And it would be on the E/I or, to a lesser extent, T/F axis rather than S/N.
Small talk is a social ritual that functions as a method of negotiating relationships between people in communication. Among other things, it allows, for instance, one to gauge the mood and willingness of their interlocutor in order to determine the limits of possible conversation. In other words, the point of small talk is not to exchange content through communication, but rather to understand how to communicate in any particular instance (with any particular person.) Function over content. To say that small talk is pointless because you talk about mundane things is, therefore, nothing other than a triviality.
Personally, I do generally dislike engaging in small talk. But the reason that I do is because I dislike communicating in general with people to whom I am not well acquainted (i.e., people who I would have to engage in small talk with in order to communicate, because I don't know them well and therefore don't know how to communicate with them), not because the topics are boring. To say the latter would be akin to saying that I dislike candy wrappers because they don't taste as good the candy bar. Which is stupid.
Furthermore, to say that you are bad at small talk is the same as saying that you are bad at being social.
I tend to use small talk as a means to end and tend to dislike it for a number of reasons
1) as you stated in bold, small talk is a social ritual and i dislike being bound social conventions, even if I can see the validity in them. i suppose it's similar to how Ss can see the validity in logic and theory, but they don't like to use more than they need (I'm making a rather sweeping generalization here, please correct me if you disagree)
2) being N obviously I would rather talk about the secrets of the universe than the weather or obvious detail oriented conversations
3) I'm an E4 which so I can't stand anything that is conventional or normal
4) I'll admit, I am kind of a snob. I don't exclude people for things like race, appearence or religion, but I do exclude other people who are of low intelligence, weak mental fortitude or lack integrity. oh, and people who are people pleasers (people pleasing is SO pathetic)
5) similarly, I am a very self centered person and if someone can't benefit me in any way, I'd rather not waste time with them (not very F of me is it lol)