12 baseless opinions about having good conversations

Never talk about Jurassic Park, etc.

photo cred: my dad

Good conversations have lots of doorknobs is one of my most-read posts ever. Unfortunately, it’s one of those namby-pamby internet advice posts that’s like “Ooh, I dunno, maybe think a little more about X and a little less about Y, for these reasons.” In the blogging game, sometimes you gotta stand up straight and spout baseless opinions.

So, look. I used to watch people have conversations for a living. It hurt. People would be like:

PERSON 1: So, uh, do you like food?

PERSON 2: Oh yeah food is good.

PERSON 1: I know. Eating, right?

PERSON 2: Definitely.

Maybe that’s why, according to lots of research, people get really stressed out about having conversations and don’t expect them to go well.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Effortless intimacy can be yours if you merely listen to these 12 baseless opinions.

1. Boring conversations are a choice.

A crazy thing I used to see teaching Improv 101: although people could literally do anything in their scenes—go to the moon! be wizards! thwart a terrorist plot!—they would instead sit down, pretend to type on a keyboard, and go, “I hate my job!” Give people unlimited freedom and they will, alarmingly often, choose to have a bad time.

So too in conversations. People will be like, “How many cousins do you have,” and then be like, “Wow this conversation sucks so much.” Talk about the stuff you want to talk about! Ask people the things you want to know! Do you think the other person wants to count their cousins? Go to the moon, dammit.

2. People are extremely weird and this is a gift and you should unwrap it.

I was on a podcast once where the host was like, “I met a woman who said she studies cloth, and I thought that was so boring that I had nothing to say to her.”

That seems crazy to me! Not the studying cloth part—the being bored part. What a precious gift, meeting someone who studies cloth! Who the heck does that? What does it even mean to “study cloth”? Isn’t cloth just...fibers? There’s obviously something here, or else you wouldn’t be able to spend all day studying it and get paid for it. What are the controversies in the field of Cloth Studies? How do you become a studier of cloth? By the way, should I feel bad for wearing polyester, and also, what is polyester?