Avoiding small talk

Small talk – I really bloody hate it.

Where are you from? How long have you been in Berlin? All these questions, I try and avoid asking them unless I really have to.

These past few weeks I’ve been, what you might say, ‘quite social’ and met a handful of new people. I purposely tried to avoid asking these easy questions to make conversation – so perhaps I could have come off as unfriendly.

The question I dislike most is ‘what do you do?’ because it normally really means, ‘what do you do for work?’ Why is this the most common question to ask?? My job does not define me. I may work in frontend development, but I don’t really consider myself as a developer. It is absolutely not the most defining thing about me. How did this happen? That how you earn your living is the easiest question to ask a stranger? Is it because most people are so consumed by their work that it is the only thing they know?

I need to come up with some obscure questions to ask instead of these generic ones…