I'm not much for small talk, sometimes it bores my soul to death.
In high school, I used to love having lunch with my physics teacher. We'd have philosophical discussions about what it meant to be happy, what life was, whether there could be an afterlife, how science developed, relativity. My nerdy friends and I were content.
In my first job, I had similar deep lunch conversations with other interns about life, poverty, what we'd like to achieve some day, what fairness means, cool scientific inventions, family dynamics and estranged relationships, our first impressions of each other, and how it had changed since. We got to know each other through these discussions without necessarily saying anything about ourselves. There was always a new topic naturally coming up, always with various angles, more questions than answers, more thinking to be done.
Somehow, bringing up these more interesting topics doesn't come as naturally nowadays. I don't know if there's an unwritten rule about sticking to small talk and business at lunch in "the real world" but that could very well be. These conversations happen but very rarely. Yet, my brain wants something meaty to gnaw at. Something that's very different from everything else going on at work/home, something that will oil these silent machines that eventually put two and two together from all those disparate topics and spurt out a great idea. Something that isn't as depressing as the current political climate either. For now, I give it a book to read but I'd like to go back to arguing with other buzzing brains on a more regular basis.
