Over the past couple of months, I’ve begun to notice very many people that don’t seem to really say anything at all. They partake in conversations, they certainly say a lot of words, but I struggle to find what they are actually trying to convey.

For example, in the middle of an interesting group dialogue, these people start to spout irrelevant examples, shitty summaries of others’ opinions, or literally anything to keep the conversation going, but only down very uninteresting paths.

Even worse, they might ask the more experienced interlocutors to predict the future on vague scary forces like ‘AI’. I don’t think much that is worthwhile can be really said without laying out sufficient context so it feels like a waste of time to force an answer on such short notice.

This combination of vagueries and auguries is annoying because it feels rude to point out its occurence so you can’t really do something about it like re-steering the topic without having to wait it out.

It’s frustrating because I feel like I’m being offered a cheap substitute for the good kind of human interaction where people talk about real things that they actually know about from their lives. Now I’m just getting a highlight reel like YouTube Shorts or headlines from Hacker News.

As a schoolboy, I would often indulge in this practice, but I was fortunate enough to get scolded by my parents when they heard such utterances. It still keeps me up at night to think that I’m doing it these days, only now people are too polite to call me out, and I am too ignorant to realise in the moment.

Thus, it seems like the only way to mitigate this vapid talk is to have people that are close enough and knowledgeable enough to call out your bullshit. I think I am lucky enough to have many such people in my life.

This also seems related to the archetype of the high power executive with a bunch of yes-people that continually affirm this (maybe unintentional?) behaviour.

I don’t think such diversions happen as often when talking about less, for lack of a better word, 'big' stuff (big in culture, big in peoples’ heads, big in it of itself, etc.) because there is less ego involved. There can be plenty of interesting human interaction to be had when talking about bicycles or coffee or jazz.

I’m sure there are countless performative individuals that attach their identities to such topics, but more often than not it is just excited, knowledgeable people sharing their experiences, resulting in joy and new insights.

This is really abrupt but I don’t know what more to say on this topic, just that I needed to get it out of my head.