Finnish people will tell you that they don't like small talk. I queried that with both a Finnish friend and my language instructor. They love talking about the weather. They just don't like being asked, "How are you."

I don't like being asked "how are you" either. It's too personal. But I consider the weather to also be small talk. Making social connections by starting with "lovely day" or "wish I brought an umbrella" are terrific. We can all smile and nod. Noticing something nice about someone is also a great conversation starter: "Your roses are doing well", "I love your shoes", "Thanks for stopping and saying hello."

I take walks most days. Small talk is how I am making friends at my new home!

Well......

Once upon a time - at an IETF meeting (San Diego) back during the America's Cup races - we were all out on the patio chatting. A woman came up to me and I read her name badge - Janette. (I am sure that the character of Janette in the Good Place TV show was modeled on her.) I knew her only by email conversations, we had never actually previously met.

She looked at my badge and yelled - screamed actually - at the top of her lungs:

OH MY GOD!!! IT'S YOU!!!

It permanently stunted my growth.

But she and I became good friends. She died a few years ago.

I met both my ex and my wife at networking trade shows.

In the first instance the first words that she heard me say was a question to our VP of marketing - "When do we lie?" A lot of ears perked up with that.

My (now) wife ran the Interop show net, so she and I had talked some technical and administrative stuff in passing. But at the DC show over coffee I said "Everything we know about network management is wrong." As a technical statement, it was, and remains, quite true. As a pick-up line, wow! That was nearly 35 years ago.

@Muse - "I take walks most days. Small talk is how I am making friends at my new home!"

This!

I met my wife at an online poker room via the chat for players at the same table. This could be transcribed, about 85%,

"NH" [Nice hand]
"TY"

BTW this was 1997.

That's funny @Richard, maybe they think you're talking on a headset🙂

@Muse now that you mention it, I don't use how are you unless it's a friend. Usually it is something about the weather or Bennie if we're out walking.

I can pull of small talk as a stunt, and can be good at it if I put in the effort. However it is seldom rewarding, and the sort-of-insincerity provokes a bit of self-loathing.

I do keep my ears open for a chance to turn a conversation interesting, and sometimes I am rewarded. I was recently at a meeting at a remote institute in Maine (granted, such a situation is far more likely to go from small to interesting talk pretty quickly, no matter who one encounters), which included a harpsichord concert. I chanced to get chatted up by the person who was tuning the harpsichord for the performer that night, but we quickly skipped the small talk and went directly into things like non-harmonic overtones and such. It helps to be a dilettante autodidact.

As far as small talk with the GP goes, I try to project an "I'm working" vibe most of the time, which is easy, since I mostly think about the things I'm working on anyway, and thus technically that is my work. So I often avoid small talk constitutively.

The thing to remember is that while for neurotypical people small talk is how you feel someone out or fill in an awkward space, for an autist it is not only extremely difficult and awkward, but often very stressful and even threatening. Because we do not have the instinctive understanding of how it works. For mercy's sake, let us get onto talking about something we actually understand.

Many of us eventually learn not to info-dump ALL the time. ;)

My problem with small talk isn't that I don't like it, it's that I know you don't actually care about what I'm talking about, so why should I.

Like when people ask me if I have plans for the weekend. Most of the time it's the same an everyone else, catching up on sleep and housework. If I do have something interesting going on, is it going to be something you are interested in? Most of my coworkers don't get all excited to talk about Dungeons and Dragons when I say I'm doing my usual game that weekend.

I don't watch sports, so can't contribute to a conversation about that...

I don't have kids to commiserate about.

But I'm happy to let the other person talk about their small topic. I'll listen and ask constructive questions, if I can think of any. I like learning about things and people, so I'm interested in you. But I don't talk because I don't think you are interested in me, correct or not. I think it's part of imposter syndrome, or just bad self-esteem. Eventually that may change as we interact, but if this is a one off meeting and I don't expect to ever talk to you again, like at a mutual friend's wedding, then I just don't see the point in speaking.

@stefani banerian - Your mention of smalltalk reminded me of APL - one of the most obscure programming languages of all time. And I wondered if I can make one that is more obscure.

So I am imagining a language that is some sort of cross between APL and LISP that must be typed in by dancing on a large keyboard, much like Tom Hanks in the movie "Big", or perhaps on a Twister-like floor.

(I once knew someone who had parties where everybody got naked and covered with oil and then went into a small, pitch-black dark tent, and "had fun" (I never attended) - yeah, she was a weird person - such a place could be an "interesting" venue for doing that dance/twister style programming, or at least enliven some of those "hacker" spaces.)

My default modes are to assume the best of everyone until I am given clear indications that something is wrong. Smiling and saying "hi!" usually lets me know quickly whether or not someone is friendly, or even just needs boundaries respected.

I moved a lot growing up. I had to be sensitive to who might might make good friends. As the new kid my easiest places to find human interaction was with the nerds, geeks, and "weirdos". Many of these kids were just fine. They just didn't fit in as "normal". One of my best friends was a girl whose parents were both deaf. Because of that she didn't learn how to use her voice correctly, and had an odd husky way of saying things. Other than that she was a kind and smart person.

@Karl Auerbach you know there is an Esoteric Programming Languages webring, right?

I came up with an EPL of my own that I call Gender. It is a conceptual EPL with no reserved words in which almost anything can be arbitrarily reassigned, code can be data (and vice versa) depending on context, and the interpreter is trained by example on each startup.

Finnish people will tell you that they don’t like small talk. I queried that with both a Finnish friend and my language instructor. They love talking about the weather.

::peeps residency in Finland::

They just don’t like being asked, “How are you.”
I don’t like being asked “how are you” either. It’s too personal.

well, that, and the people who are asking don't actually GAF

I'm almost always unwell anymore (and if I'm not, Mr. Stranger probably is), so that question gets answered with "upright" or "hanging in there" or some such

Many encounters in New York were pleasant, in that people seemed to take the extra 2 seconds or so and try and understand what i wanted or replied.

NY was a pretty wild experience for this then-blissfully unaware autist. I shared a smile with a grouch on the rush-hour subway in Times Square, but erred with the homeless guy in the all-night coffee shop and got followed back to my office building in the middle of the night. Thank the gods they had security.

oh, and I don't appreciate being forced to be chatty now on any future outings I may need to make to Target 😒

that's few and far between since they shanked the rainbow community (and are now shanking the ND community), but they're still my sole local source for a handful of items

I’m almost always unwell anymore (and if I’m not, Mr. Stranger probably is), so that question gets answered with “upright” or “hanging in there” or some such

I am wont to answer "Mostly by thinking," when the mood takes me. It's not like anybody asks to actually get the answer.