From the computer of Peter Clark

Spending my childhood summers in Portugal, I spent a lot of time in cafés where people would argue about anything and everything. Finding the minor disagreement that would spark the argument was the goal of being at that café. Someone unfamiliar with that kind of environment would walk in and assume a fight was gonna break out. But this was just people communicating. This was people enjoying their evening by having spirited conversations with their friends. Which, counter-intuitively, ends up bringing people together. Because if I enjoy a lively discussion—and I do—the person willing to go toe-to-toe with me is going to be someone I end up treasuring as a friend. As long as everyone understands the rules of discussion. We are arguing about minor things. We’re making argumentative mountains out of molehills. This isn’t conflict, it’s sport.

People systematically underestimate how interesting and enjoyable conversations about “boring” topics will be. Across nine preregistered experiments with 1,800 participants, conversations about dull-seeming topics turned out better than expected across friends/strangers, online/in-person, and self-chosen/assigned topics.

Before talking, people overweight the static topic (“this sounds boring”) and underweight the dynamic parts of conversation — attention, responsiveness, listening, turn-taking, and the small discoveries that emerge once two people are actually engaged.

I live in NYC in a huge building and have made friends with so many of my neighbors. Having a kid helps — it’s easy to meet parents of other kids on the local playground and older people like to engage with little ones. Once after chatting in the elevator with a woman in her 90s about my toddler’s potty training, she stopped by with a potty training book that had a sticker chart. He loved it and was so enchanted that she brought it by especially for him. We became friendly — turns out she is a playwright. Eventually she invited us to the debut of one of her plays and my husband went while I wrangled the toddler. It was on a weeknight somewhere deep in Harlem. He said that at the end he realized another neighbor, our doorman and the building super were in the audience too — just the whole building quietly supporting her.

Perhaps, I thought, a man’s life is less like a single tree and more like a garden in the wild, under constant threat of being reclaimed by nature. The bits we want to keep must be cared for, watered, maintained. Kind of like a golf course.