“Hey, how was your break?”

People are going to be asking each other this empty question for the better part of the next week, and reply to each other with equally empty answers.

Fine or great, fun or boring. People are going to engage in such a conversation in droves while running into each other on campus, both parties briefly consenting to pull one ear bud out and take part in some insignificant babbling.

The question is simple, it’s superficial and it’s something everyone capable of speech can answer. It is something we can use to pull ourselves away from our phones for 30 seconds and acknowledge that other people exist out there in the universe. It’s the same dialogue no matter where you go – we could read it off of a script if we wanted.

We establish that everyone had a good break, make a passing joke about the weather and then, we move on.

Let’s just establish this rule for good – nobody cares what happened during break. Nobody cares how good your time abroad was, or what you had for lunch, or how classes are going. It’s all just fulfilling the human social contract: When we see someone we know, we must look up from Temple Run 2 and engage in meaningless pabulum to prove we still have the ability to interact socially.

In January, there was a variation on this theme.

“How was your time abroad?”

Sure, like you really want to know the full breakdown of what happened during the course of six months spent in a foreign land, especially when we’ve just bumped into each other on Marshall Street and it’s 20 degrees outside with bone-chilling 30-mph winds. Why do I need to stop and engage in nothing-talk that goes nowhere while I slowly succumb to hypothermia?

Why do we do this? Why, in the age of texting and ignoring people ad nauseum, do we feel compelled to subject ourselves to this bizarre exercise? Why do we continue to envelope ourselves in useless subtext and time-wasting pretense?

You’d think the advent of technology would lead to face-to-face conversations only when absolutely necessary. Yet, we conduct our most important business digitally, while making light, petty conversation in person.

It reminds me of basement parties during freshman year, when guys would attempt to hit on girls by asking, “What’s your major?”

Asking is the wrong word, actually. Screaming over some pulsating Rihanna sex romp played at the volume of an F-22 Raptor taking off is more like it. I’m sure most, if not all, freshman dudes in that situation are feverishly interested in learning what Catie – or possibly Cira with a “C” – has chosen as her path of study.

Though the context is a bit different, the subtext is similar. When you’re asking me how my Spring Break was, you’re just putting in the due diligence to talk to me for five seconds before you go on with your day and deal with the more important things in your life. Just as a lot of guys try and pretend to be interested in what they can’t hear over the pounding of music so they can perform their due diligence and attempt to…you get where I’m going.

Disturbing analogy aside, I don’t know what this means about us as a society today. I just know I’m already damn tired of having the same emotionally vacuous conversation six times a day, every day for the next week.

Well, I have nothing interesting left to say, so…how was your break?

Kevin Slack is a senior television, radio and film major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at khslack@syr.edu and followed on Twitter at @kevinhslack. 

Published on March 19, 2013 at 1:30 am