I've started noticing more and more that a shockingly large amount of conversations are little more than continuous references to things both me and my conversational partner have read, seen or heard. With my brothers it's Reddit. With my fellow coders it's HN. With my college friends it's a grab-bag of New Yorker, NYTimes, Instapaper / Longreads articles, and our national 'top publications'. Whichever one has recently published a particularly thoughtful (or really, viral) article.
Sometimes I find myself in a conversation like this with multiple, and it makes me feel like I'm in a Family Guy episode (even weirder: referring to a family guy joke that is itself only funny because it's a reference).
I've started avoiding these conversations, because it's just too easy to get stuck in a 'small-talk loop' that just goes on and on. I think that says something about the subject matter, because I noticed that when discussing, say, a book we've read or a lengthy documentary, we inevitably end up in a fascinating conversation about the subject matter.
(another solution, I've found, is to pretend that I didn't also read/watch x, and get someone to explain and reason about it.)
I've started noticing more and more that a shockingly large amount of conversations are little more than continuous references to things both me and my conversational partner have read, seen or heard. With my brothers it's Reddit. With my fellow coders it's HN. With my college friends it's a grab-bag of New Yorker, NYTimes, Instapaper / Longreads articles, and our national 'top publications'. Whichever one has recently published a particularly thoughtful (or really, viral) article.
Sometimes I find myself in a conversation like this with multiple, and it makes me feel like I'm in a Family Guy episode (even weirder: referring to a family guy joke that is itself only funny because it's a reference).
I've started avoiding these conversations, because it's just too easy to get stuck in a 'small-talk loop' that just goes on and on. I think that says something about the subject matter, because I noticed that when discussing, say, a book we've read or a lengthy documentary, we inevitably end up in a fascinating conversation about the subject matter.
(another solution, I've found, is to pretend that I didn't also read/watch x, and get someone to explain and reason about it.)