me_irl

There's a clear issue in how people define the phrase, and it's easy to understand why when I look up the definition and the Merriam-Webster defines it as "light or casual conversation" with the synonym of "chitchat" but the Cambridge dictionary specifically says that it's "conversations about things that are not important, often between people who do not know each other well."

Those are two very distinct views on the concept (with the second having a rather...negative connotation to it, in my opinion), and I think it gets even further muddled by one very simple thing that I think is the real root of the argument: whether someone is an introvert or an extrovert. And I'm not talking about the "introvert=shy" that has pervaded common culture, but the actual psychological definition of the two which is about how people use and recharge mental/emotional energy. Extroverts are energized by social interaction, regardless of whether they're shy or not, while introverts are exhausted by it. So introverts naturally have a more transactional relationship with social interaction because they have to. If they didn't, they'd emotionally and mentally burn out. So to an introvert, any social interaction has to be weighed against how much mental and emotional energy they're willing to invest into it, and cultural formalities with people you don't know or care about to simply fill periods of silence with human noise would therefore fall very far down the list of things that they want to do. Whereas an extrovert, for whom basically any conversation could be like water to a parched plant, would delight at pretty much any chance to engage any random person.

So what we really have in this thread is introverts saying that they'd rather spend their limited daily emotional labor on the people they love than random strangers and extroverts mystified by the concept that anybody would balk at the opportunity for stimulating conversation.