Small Talk and Silence — Interruption #5

Learning to embrace the beauties of both

As a young adult, whenever I traveled alone on airplanes, I silently prayed for two things: 1) that the plane wouldn’t crash, and 2) that neither of my seatmates would talk to me.

I’ve never been a huge fan of small talk, largely because I’ve never considered myself very good at it. It was small talk on airplanes that I feared the most because I knew I’d be stuck with my conversation partner for hours, and small talk only lasts so long.

These days, I rarely have to worry about strangers on planes talking to me. While many of us bare our souls to strangers online (yours truly included), small talk seems to be a dying social phenomenon. We are generally too busy conversing with the avatars in our phones to even bother making eye contact with the real people sitting next to us.