For many, small talk does not strengthen or maintain a relationship. It is something that works for some people. Others endure it for the sake of the one who does but it doesn’t hold the same role for them and is not a necessity to have a loving and healthy relationship for everyone. Just as we express and receive love differently, small talk doesn’t serve the same role in everyone’s life. If it does for you, that’s great, hopefully you’re getting what you need.

As for the double duty, that is true of all communication, whether small or not. As noted above, it may be an expression of love for some people, but it’s far from universal.

Not everyone finds the smaller, and often repetitive, experiences of their day to be important or valuable and people are perfectly capable of having time for the other person’s life and feelings without the focus being those smaller topics or experiences. Additionally, some people have more important/larger concerns in their day to day life than how the frappuccino from Starbucks was that morning.

It sounds like you value smalltalk in your life but may not accept that it isn’t as widespread as you seem to imply. I don’t doubt it does what you claim for yourself and others you know. Lastly, what one considers small talk varies greatly, topics of seeming low import may be more meaningful within the shared lives of the couple, depending on what going on.

Only for those who spend time engaged with existential topics rather than shopping though.

Need for small talk suggests the contents of your thoughts revolves around topics and depth of thought suitable for small talk, I wish you the best in finding someone similar who can appreciate its value to your life. I’ll be elsewhere and hope you wish me the same luck. Anything that is meaningfully impactful to my partner however, is never small talk.

But does it do it less often than humans?

Advertising exists to manipulate behavior beneficial to clients, out of target groups. It is propaganda and psychological manipulation. The days of simply informing people of products and services is a fairy tale. Maddison Avenue was built off of Nazi Germany’s mass media propaganda strategies.

How is this possibly going to be tolerated in business environments?

Wrong. That’s absolutely what your responsibility as a citizen is, to ensure the protection of democracy from everyone in any position capable of undermining it.

Not directly, it just helps build a world in which empathy and freedom are dead.

All to better manipulate you into giving more money to a corporation than the value of the product or service they give you in return. This entire fucking system is to manage how much the powerful are able to exploit the weak.

Boomers gonna boom.

They will follow us everywhere. If the medium is commercial, the capitalists will capture it. If its public, the extreme social interest groups will capture it.

Stalin would have, and possibly did, murder non-binary folk without hesitation.

Stuff like this makes women seem incredibly judgemental, while also demanding to not be judged.

These people are threats to our actual lives.

But their tolerance for making you suffer differs significantly.

It’s the same in every sector where people are dependent on following orders to eat and house themselves. Health insurance in america isn’t any different. People are forced to be assholes to each other just to feed themselves and it’s a symptom of how business businesses.

Wage stagnating and unbalanced wealth distribution is a reward decrease, imo.

We’ve long since discarded the faggy liberal Democrat reward system with the superior punishment system. /s

We’ve gone from the reward being more happiness to the reward being less suffering.

Didn’t windows also start tracking how you use windows?

Okay but you don’t get to tell others what they need to think and feel about your experience.