The Only Two Things We Ever Say to Each Other
If you listen to any conversation really carefully - strip away the filler words, the polite nodding, and the hand gestures - you’ll realize something about human interaction.
We only do two things: We ask questions, or we complain.
That’s it. That is the entirety of human dialogue. We are either launching an interrogation, or we are airing a grievance. There usually is no third thing.
Think about the standard progression of meeting someone new. The first twenty minutes is just a polite cross-examination. Where did you grow up? What do you do for work? Did you find parking okay? It’s a verbal ping-pong match of data gathering. You are basically a human captcha proving you aren't a robot.
If it all goes well, and you build a little bit of trust, you get to graduate to the highest form of human intimacy: the mutual complaint.
The questions stop, and the real bonding begins. The parking here is actually a nightmare. My work is driving me insane. Why is it so humid today? Complaining is the glue that holds society together. If you walk up to a stranger and say, "The sky is beautiful today" (and Sydney has some beautiful skies), they will look at you like you’re a weird hoboman. But if you stand next to that same stranger at a crosswalk and sigh, "They really need to fix the timing on these lights", you have a much better chance of not getting a weird look. You have established a shared enemy. You are practically family now.
I catch myself doing it all the time. I'll be talking to a mate, and I can feel my brain frantically toggling between the two modes. Okay, I've asked three questions in a row, I'm sounding like a detective. Quick, complain about something.
I actually went down a rabbit hole trying to figure out why we do this, and it turns out we can just blame evolution. Psychologists have found that a massive chunk of all human conversation is basically just "gossip" - which is the academic way of saying we complain about things to see if the other person agrees with us. It’s how early humans figured out who was in their tribe.
On top of that, our brains are hardwired with a negativity bias. We register annoyances and minor inconveniences way more intensely than pleasant things. So when you complain to someone about the humidity, you aren't actually looking for a meteorological solution. You're just trying to validate that you share the same reality as the person next to you. You're basically just knocking on the wall to see if anyone else is trapped in the same room.
If you don’t believe me, try to break the matrix tomorrow. Try having a five-minute conversation with a co-worker where you don't ask a single question and absolutely refuse to complain about anything. I reckon you will last about forty seconds before the silence becomes so suffocating that you panic and blurt out, "So... crazy weather we're having, right?"
I don't really have a profound takeaway for why I wrote this, other than the fact that I couldn't stop noticing it. But I can pretty much guarantee one thing - the next time I talk to someone, I am either going to ask them a question about this, or complain that I noticed it in the first place.