Too often, we think of good conversations as the ones that convey practical information and bad conversations as the ones that don’t.
This is a mistake.
When you spend time with your friend, do you spend your time conveying useful, practical, information to each other? I doubt it. You might talk about films, politics, music, your lives, challenges you face, and all manner of trivial issues.
Does that make these conversations any less meaningful? No. They’re all bonding discussions. They bring your group closer together. That’s meaningful. It would be bizarre to restrict your community solely to conveying useful information. These are all good discussions.
We might, however, want to restrict the meaningless conversations. You might want to close/stop the discussions that don’t increase self-disclosure nor reveal useful information. You get to the the arbiter of what’s meaningful/meaningless. I suspect at the moment we’re too timid about that role. It’s a tough one, but one that needs to be performed.
We need to change good and bad discussions to meaningful and meaningless.
