🚕Several days ago, I got into an Uber wanting one of the smallest luxuries modern life can offer: silence.
Just a quiet ride, please. A temporary break from being perceived.
Instead, the driver asked me what my name means.
Under normal circumstances, that is a harmless question. Maybe even a kind one. It is one of those small, socially approved ways people try to connect with each other. I know that. I really do. But that day, I did not want to explain myself. Not my mood, not my background, not the origin of my name, not anything. I just wanted to sit in the back seat like a Victorian ghost being transported from one obligation to another.
So I said, “Nothing.”
And he said, “So Tsian means empty?”
Honestly… incredible.🙂
It was such an efficient misunderstanding that I almost had to respect it. In two lines, we had gone from small talk to accidental existential diagnosis. Most conversations take at least ten minutes to become unbearable. This one speed-ran itself into philosophy.
“So Tsian means empty?”
There was something almost beautiful about how quickly everything fell apart. I was trying to avoid small talk, and somehow I ended up being turned into a symbol. Not a passenger. Not a person. Not even a tired woman in the back of an Uber trying to protect the last thread of her mental peace. Just empty. A void with a seatbelt on.
At the time, it felt like proof of everything I dislike about small talk.
Small talk is exhausting in a very specific way. It asks for very little, but somehow still feels like too much. It asks you to be lightly friendly on command. It asks for polished little answers when all you want is to be quiet for a moment without being pulled into a performance.
I hate the way silence is treated like a problem. I hate how quickly a peaceful quiet becomes awkwardness in someone else’s eyes. If you say too little, you seem rude. If you say too much, suddenly you are trapped in a conversation you never wanted, talking about your weekend like it is a hostage negotiation.
But later, I kept thinking about it, and I had to admit something I did not really want to admit.
Small talk is necessary.
Not because the actual content matters that much. Nobody’s life is changed by “busy, but good” or “crazy weather today.” But small talk is often how people try to be kind to each other. It is how they signal that they mean well. It is how they say, in the simplest possible way, I see you, I mean no harm, I am trying to make this moment a little less cold.
And that does matter.
Probably more than I like to admit.
The truth is, small talk is usually not about information. It is about effort. A small gesture. A soft way of reaching toward another person. It is the shallow end of connection, and not everyone knows how to start anywhere deeper. Not every person arrives with poetry. Some arrive with weather. Some arrive with traffic. Some arrive by asking what your name means.
And honestly, maybe that should count for something.
I still do not enjoy small talk. I still find it repetitive, awkward, and a little soul-draining. But I can see its purpose now. I can see that it keeps daily life from becoming too sharp, too cold, too transactional. It fills the space before silence starts to feel hostile. It gives strangers a script for basic kindness.
Maybe that is why the Uber moment stayed with me.
Because yes, “So Tsian means empty?” is still one of the funniest things anyone has ever accidentally said to me. It felt less like a question and more like a brutal summary of modern existence. But it was also, in its own clumsy way, an attempt. The driver was not trying to annoy me. He was just doing what people do. Reaching out in the smallest available way. Trying to make brief human contact before dropping me off and disappearing back into the machinery of the day.
That is what makes small talk so irritating, but also so hard to dismiss. It is awkward. It is repetitive. It is often absurd. But it is also one of the most ordinary ways people try to be human with each other.
I just wish I were better at it.
I wish friendliness came to me more naturally in those little passing moments. I wish I knew how to respond to those small openings without immediately feeling tired. I wish I knew how to stay myself while also making the world feel a little softer for the people moving through it beside me.
Not that small talk is profound, or that I have suddenly learned to love it. But it does have a purpose, and that purpose is kindness, even when it comes in awkward, diluted, painfully unpoetic forms.
So yes, for a brief moment, I was rebranded as emptiness itself. But later, I had to admit that the exchange was trying to say something else.
Sometimes small talk is not just meaningless noise. Sometimes it is one imperfect person knocking softly on the door of another.
And maybe, in time, I will learn how to answer that knock a little better. 🚕🌙🖤