The Promise of “Conversation Menus”
If you’re not a literal sociopath, you probably enjoy having meaningful conversations about your feelings. I certainly do.
Last year, I bought a set of "Conversation Menus". A Conversation Menu is a set of “meaningful” questions printed on a piece of paper. Each conversation menu has a different topic. For example, the Friendship menu has questions like:
What frustrates you about social life?
What do you want your friends to “get” about you?
What enables you to “connect” well with someone?
I knew these menus would make my conversations better. I imagined myself whipping them out at dinner parties, dodging small-talk, and jumping straight to meaningful conversation. So I bought them.
A week later, I was walking to my friend’s house for dinner. Four of my other friends were on their way. I showed my friend the Conversation Menus, and she said, “Perfect, now I don’t have to answer So how are things at work? for the tenth time.” I set the table with one Conversation Menu at each seat. Standing up, they looked like this:
When my friends arrived, they immediately “get” the Conversation Menus. What I realized: pretty much everyone prefers “meaningful" conversation to small-talk. People were actually grateful that I’d brought something to help prevent small-talk.
When we sat down, we started with the Ambition Menu. I asked the first question:
Were your parents fulfilled in their ambitions?
We all went around the table, sharing the dreams of our parents. I learned things about my friends that I never would’ve known. One of my friend’s parents had dropped out of medical school. Another had been in a Metal band for seven years. I’m dead serious: here’s their Spotify.
After that, we talked about our proudest achievements, our most toxic relationships, and our controversial opinions that we hide from the world. It was like playing jeopardy, but all the categories are “deep” conversation topics. I’ll take internalizing childhood trauma for 800, Alex.
The conversations were enjoyable, but they were also surprisingly empty. Actually, they were worse than empty. They were pornographic.
“Deep Conversation Porn” and The Story of Your Conversation
Using “Conversation Menus” turns meaningful conversation into porn. Don’t think of “porn” in the ~adult videos~ sense. Think “porn” more in the “EarthPorn” or the “Food Porn” sense.
What you’ll realize is that “porn” has the same meaning, whether we are talking about adult videos, nature photography, or food pics.
When something is presented within the context of a story, it’s art. Without that context, it’s porn. Here are some examples:
Sex: If we see a sex scene in the middle of a 2-hour movie, it’s art. If it’s a three-minute clip on Pornhub, then it’s porn.
Nature: If you see a landscape painted by Monet, it’s art. But when you take a picture of that same landscape and throw it on Reddit, it belongs on r/EarthPorn.
Food: If you see a documentary about the craft of BBQ, it’s art. But if you see a picture of some baby-back ribs on Instagram, then it’s #FoodPorn.
See the pattern? This article basically says the same thing:
“In essence, if the image is explicit and if there’s no story behind it, it’s porn.”
That’s the formula: porn equals explicit minus story. In this context, “explicit” doesn’t necessarily mean nipples. EarthPorn is explicitly beautiful:
Here, “explicit” means “in your face.” We see the beautiful photo. We are told that it’s beautiful. But there is almost no narrative included. There’s no story. That’s what makes it porn.
And that’s what made my “meaningful” conversations feel porn-y. They’re explicitly meaningful, but we were just plopped into them without any “story.” Our menu-based conversations seemed meaningful, but they didn’t have any lasting emotional weight. They didn’t stick with us after we left dinner. They didn’t keep us up at night. We started these conversations in a vacuum: without context, without narrative, and most importantly: without foreplay.
Here, another word for foreplay is “small-talk.” Some of my smartest peers say things like, “I hate small-talk" or “small-talk is boring.” But that perspective reveals an incomplete understanding of what small-talk actually is. Small-talk is the ritual through which we develop the “story” of a conversation.
Small-talk is not about the words. It’s about feelings. Small-talk helps conversationalists affirm each other through agreement and empathy, which opens the door for vulnerability.
When we small-talk, we get a sense of someone’s mood. We find out how their day was. We find out how the weather is affecting them. All of this is important. It creates context that allows us to understand emotionally where our conversation partner is coming from. In other words, it is the opening sequence of our story. The goal here is immersion, not brevity. And through small-talk, we join hands with our conversation partner and wade into the murky waters of vulnerable, more meaningful discussion.
So what’s my final review of Conversation Menus? Think about it like this: imagine if you’d never seen Star Wars and then someone showed you the climatic I Am Your Father scene:
You might enjoy it. But it wouldn’t be meaningful.