"I'm disappointed with the conversations I've been having with people I know, but don't know that well, recently," a deeply wise and insightful friend said to me recently. "It's always the same thing. We talk about how busy we are and about how we don't how we're going to handle this semester, or whatever it difficult thing comes to mind. And that's it."

Her comment resonated with me because I knew that I had had that conversation as well, particularly with acquaintances and people that I knew mainly in passing. And often, I had been the person repeating those same tired sentences, "Oh, I just have so much to do," and "I don't know how I'll survive this class." I have also been hearing this conversation everywhere. Whether it's people who run into each other at the coffee bar or classmates chatting before class, we're all saying the same things to the people we know.

This has become our default small talk topic. When having a conversation with someone we aren't especially close to, we fill the spaces in our conversation with these same words and phrases. "I'm so busy." "I have so much homework, I don't know how I'll get it all done." "Life is just crazy right now." From the way we talk to each other, you'd think that we were all building supercomputers, curing cancer, and writing the next Great American novel at the same time. The truth is, we usually aren't any more "busy" than other people and our lives aren't any more "crazy" than other people's, either. Telling others how busy we are is simply the new way of talking about the weather. The biggest problem here manifests in the fact that this form of small talk can never be anything bigger than small talk. How do you respond when someone tells you how "busy" they are? You smile, you try to look sympathetic, you say "Wow, I'm sorry, that sounds terrible," and then tell them how busy you are, too. It's an easy, thoughtless, brain-dead interaction. Neither person invests anything in the conversation, and everyone walks away untouched and unmoved. Just one more way to skim the surface of life.

We need to challenge ourselves to rethink how we go about small talk. If done right, small talk can be the channel by which we come to know people on a deeper level. Light conversation can lead to the discovery of common interests, a shared sense of humor, or new perspectives and worldviews, but it will never get to that point if we continue to repeat our dead-end "I'm so busy, life is so crazy" version of small talk. Instead of complaining constantly and expressing our own eternal busyness, we need to be more honest, express more positivity, explain our perspectives more fully, and most of all, ask real questions of the people we're talking to. Instead of trying to drudge through conversations with acquaintances as quickly and easily as possible, we need to open more doors to authenic relationships. Too often, we allow our relationships to stagnate as causal acquaintanceships simply because we can't be bothered to put in the time to really get to know the person we're talking to, or allow them to know us. That's why it's time to take back small talk and start using it to grow our relationships with others. Let's stop glorifying our own busyness and start investing in other people again.

Thank you to Noemi for inspiring this piece.