A New Yorker article on American small talk is discussed here:
How the Finnish survive without small talk
71–80 of 208 posts
Re: How the Finnish survive without small talk
#72> The Finnish don’t believe in talking bullshit
How quaint!
Re: How the Finnish survive without small talk
#73As a Finn, I've always found this story quite amusing. An American comes to visit a Finnish university and tells about his first meetings there:
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
Re: How the Finnish survive without small talk
#74[flagged]
Or maybe just a climate thing? I find I want to talk much less when my face is freezing. In the long term I imagine this could have easily turned into a habit/cultural thing. You also hear about Latin American people being much "warmer" and friendly, etc.
It isn’t a climate thing. The further north you go through Finland, up to where the cold season lasts much longer than in the south, the more talkative people become. Northerners may not have smalltalk interactions with strangers, but they are more talkative among themselves than people in southern Finland.
Re: How the Finnish survive without small talk
#75It is strange that this article sees Finland as an odd man out in terms of customer-service interactions, and it suggests the USA or the UK is the norm. I have lived in both southern Europe (where people are claimed to be more extrovert) and in Finland, and generally interacting with a "barista" or cashier in both places is exactly the same, consisting of only the words "Hello" and "Thanks". In the USA one might get…
Customer-service interactions as they are in the US are not popular and are considered obtrusive even in more extrovert cultures such as southern and eastern Europe. Small talk there generally takes place between colleagues and friends.
As a customer, I'm not exactly interested in small talk, and I know that the service person isn't either, but I walk a fine line. Because I care about people as people, I want get the message across, "I see you. I know you're a real person and not a robot. Thank you for being here to help me get my lunch today." I think non-verbal communication goes a long way with this. (for the opposite effect, I see people order without so much as looking at the service person) In any case, it's important to me that people aren't treated as robots or less-than because of the job they're doing.
Re: How the Finnish survive without small talk
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
leads to depression hence their sky high suicide rates. That's a myth. Finland's suicide rate is basically the same as that in the US, and Norway, Sweden and Denmark all have a significantly lower rates.
It is an American myth? I have seen it numerous times here on HN, and always found it weird since it is very clearly false if you look up the data.
It was kind of true (at least more true) in the mid to later 80's. However since then suicide rates have dropped dramatically in both Finland and Sweden while having gone up in the US.
Re: How the Finnish survive without small talk
#77If Finns were of brown race and were to go to Karachi, Pakistan, they would get depressed as over there, people won't even acknowledge their presence.
Re: How the Finnish survive without small talk
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Customer-service interactions as they are in the US are not popular and are considered obtrusive even in more extrovert cultures such as southern and eastern Europe. Small talk there generally takes place between colleagues and friends.
As a customer, I'm not exactly interested in small talk, and I know that the service person isn't either, but I walk a fine line. Because I care about people as people, I want get the message across, "I see you. I know you're a real person and not a robot. Thank you for being here to help me get my lunch today." I think non-verbal communication goes a long way with this. (for the opposite effect, I see people order w…
> I want get the message across, "I see you. I know you're a real person and not a robot.
Thank goodness for self-service checkouts these days where we don’t have to be bothered to get that message across, though.
Re: How the Finnish survive without small talk
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a customer, I'm not exactly interested in small talk, and I know that the service person isn't either, but I walk a fine line. Because I care about people as people, I want get the message across, "I see you. I know you're a real person and not a robot. Thank you for being here to help me get my lunch today." I think non-verbal communication goes a long way with this. (for the opposite effect, I see people order w…
> I want get the message across, "I see you. I know you're a real person and not a robot. Thank goodness for self-service checkouts these days where we don’t have to be bothered to get that message across, though.
Yeah, agreed. We've got to figure out the humanitarian side with basic income or something else, but those kinds of jobs are a waste of life. Let them do literally anything else.
Re: How the Finnish survive without small talk
#80Swedish has the same saying, but it's the other way around ("tala är silver men tiga är guld", literally "talking is silver but silence is gold"). It makes more sense like that to me, but perhaps the article just got it wrong
In English there's 'silence is golden', but, lacks the 'silver' part.