Context: I had a friend ask me “Do you think that conversations with friends will often circle back to the same topic?”

My reply ended up turning into something blog-post length, so here it is. (Expect none of the typical rigor or research of a normal blog post.)

A: I think the question of conversations circling back to the same topics w/ people is a super interesting one. There’s at least three things here:

0] Do conversations tend to circle back to a set pool of topics, relative to the person you talk to?

1] If conversations tend to do this, can we make them not do this?

2] Relatedly, is it a bad thing if conversations circle back to the same topics?

 

0]

I put forward the hypothesis that your conversations with everyone are super repetitive. From asking people about their day, to commenting about work, to asking about their family, the actual pool of questions you can ask someone about isn’t that large.

Except, for the most part, you don’t notice it. So I think you’ll generally only be noticing it if the other person is also going meta, or if you’re going meta. I think this implies something about the nature/depth of conversations you have with the other party, whatever that might be.

As for why this happens: I think that people might compartmentalize their friends. For example, they have their Drinking Friends, who they joke with and talk mainly of inconsequential things. Then they have their Work Friends who they mainly mutually complain about business with. etc. etc.

So when you’re talking with someone, there’s actually not that many people for whom the entire depth of conversational possibility exists. (Something about you might find this with very good friends?)

And also, as you’ve mentioned previously, there are certain topics one might feel comfortable breaching only w/ certain people (e.g. sexuality, social dynamics, fears, insecurities, fantasies). And because of this sort of “intimacy scarcity” (there’s only so many people you can talk about X with), X ends up dominating the conversation.

To pull a little deeper, if you think about each one of your friends as optimized for talking about a specific topic (e.g. Friend A is the friend I can relate to about topic A the most with), then maybe some analog of efficient markets means that an optimal configuration is where you’ve spread out your conversation topics among partners to maximize…whatever it is that conversations maximize.

So maybe under this highly idealized model, it’s just a natural consequence of humans being conversation-fitness maximizers. (Heh.)

 

1]

I think that there are ways to make conversations less likely to circle back to the same topics:

Briefly, here are what I think are some promising ways to change things up:

a] Extend the breadth of topics acceptable for conversation. Establish variety as the norm. (Note how this seems secretly connected to novelty as an important driver behind human function. But more on that in 2].)

b] Make progress on the discussion topics that you circle back, so now the discussion actually moves, rather than being stuck in the same place.

c] Take a break from one another. Intentionally go off, change, have new experiences, and then reconvene. (My wonderful sine graph picture about separation and recombination is relevant here.)

d] Some other variant of changing things up. (Catch-all category for things.)

Here are the different tactics in more detail:

 

a]

You can think of extending the breadth of acceptable topics in two ways:

i] Between-friends

ii] Within-a-friend

In between-friends, you work on trying to expand the circle of people you feel comfortable talking about previously taboo topics with. In this way, you no longer need to keep going to the same people and having such topics dominate your conversation.

EX: Romance often seems to dominate the topic of discussion close relationships, but if you’re able to feel okay talking about it with more people (and they’re fine with it), you can move some of the bulk of the conversation to other friends.

In within-a-friend, you make an effort to talk about other things and search for other areas of mutual interest. Both of you acknowledge the spiral-y way in which certain topics can take over the conversation.

EX: You set a rule with your friend that both of you won’t spend more than, say, 50% of any conversation talking about social dynamics. Both of you are mindful and direct the conversation elsewhere when it looks like it’ll once again dominate the conversation.

 

b]

I think that discussions can be advanced. If it’s a specific question or debate that takes hold of conversations, the two of you can think about what progress on the topic looks like.

For example, we’ve had this conversation about conversations circling back to topics in the past, but now I’m giving a model under why this might happen. I’m also giving some potential remedies. Our conversation can now move to whether or not these tactics are effective, or whether or not my hypothesis does a good job of explaining things.

Less meta example: Alice and Bob often talk about whether or not advertising has a strong effect on public attitudes. Sometimes they get into circles talking about whether or not a specific example (e.g. movies) counts as “advertising”.

If, during one of their talks, Alice and Bob agree on a good definition of advertising (e.g. stuff that appears as ads in magazine), they can move forward and maybe examine the ways in which magazine ads might affect people and what those consequences might look like.

Otherwise, reframing the question, adding new information, or (gasp!) going out into the real world and coming back with new data can all change the way the conversation is held. The main thing to aim at here is that the two people involved aren’t having the same discussion every time, that they’re not rederiving all of their insights from scratch each time, but are storing save points regularly.

 

c]

I think that oversaturation is definitely a thing that can happen. Things can get boring / droll with enough repetition. See, for example, how animals stop reacting to spooky shadows if you pass the shadow overhead enough times without pairing it with actual danger. Ditto for loud sounds.

If you find that you’re seeing someone way too often to be good for either party, you might find the adage “absence makes the heart grow fonder” prescriptive.

In the same way that old friends who haven’t seen each other in a while have a lot to “catch up on”, you can artificially introduce more variety by not seeing them. It gives you more of a chance to think (and maybe come up with new thoughts, perhaps ways to advance the discussion as found in b].)

I think an interesting analog here is that of antifragility as described by Nassim Taleb, or that of hormesis. Introducing small hiccups and roadblocks to an otherwise smooth relationship might do good things in terms of building something more resilient. Something about how this can help you deal with over-reliance?

For example, if Alice and Bob find that they’ve been talking too much and there’s nothing new (as they already update one another so often), then separating can give them more space to develop new edges and corners. This is good because then when Alice and Bob reconvene they can see how their new edges and corners fit together.

Also, the obvious things about separation being highly underemphasized in Western romantic norms, so if I had to guess, I would say that people aren’t separating enough.

So, if anything, the sorta counterintuitive result that introducing difficulties and obstacles can strengthen / change the nature of your interpersonal relationships. (Of course, some relationships might also die off because of this.) Needless to say, this isn’t something that’s always applicable.

 

d]

The last thing to do, is perhaps obviously, to do new things with your friend. Then you now have new shared experiences you can talk about. Lots of good activities in this category fall under comfort-zone expansion, building more intimacy, pushing more barriers.

(There’s yet another question of whether or not you should max out your Intimacy stat with everyone, and whether or not more intimacy good all of the time / some of the time / almost none of the time. But I’ll relegate that for another time.)

To sort of map out of the space, here’s a non-exhaustive, definitely overlapping list of things to try:

1. Travel to a new place.
2. Learn something new.
3. Eat a new food.
4. Have a threesome.
5. Conduct an experiment.
6. Buy something new.
7. Take drugs.
8. Climb a mountain.

The key assumption across all of these tactics, of course, is that change of some sort seems integral to changing up the dynamic. Which sort of makes sense—otherwise, it’d be the case that doing nothing would lead to things changing.

But of course, there seems to be some sort of tension here—people seem to want stability in their relationships (i.e. they want their relationships to last). But, as Kegan mentions, these hopes are often dashed: People marry for who their spouses are, not for who they’ll become.

I think that ends up being a core conflict in how interpersonal relationships operate. There’s an inherent dichotomy, where people want their friends to stay with them, but they also expect change in their own lives. That is, their expectations might not be symmetric—they both want their friends to be by their side, but they also want change (e.g. a bigger house, more experiences, a healthier body).

And the issue sort of comes when they don’t reflect and realize their friends also want change.

Or, even if you don’t want change, in the same way that struggling (and perhaps some amount of suffering) seems like an important ingredient in producing the Human Experience™, change also appears to be an integral part of it.

I’ll dive a little bit, now, into some of the philosophical implications of seeking novelty:

 

2]

As I mentioned earlier in 1], I think novelty can fade. Novelty has this sheen that slowly dies off.

EX: I recall getting this Domo plush and I placed it on my bed. For the first two weeks, I thought it was the Cutest Thing Ever, and I kept noticing this great plush on my bed. After a while though, I looked at it, and I didn’t feel the same Tastiness. For a while, I felt like maybe I ought to be feeling the Tastiness, so I tried to intentionally force myself to feel excited about it.

That…didn’t really work.

Note how fading novelty dovetails well into the idea of the hedonic treadmill. If you’re consistently getting Good Interactions from a friend, this will likely reset your reference point / set point of what a “normal” conversation looks like, in a way that might ruin your other Not-As-Good Interactions. And thus you’re forced to keep pushing for deeper conversations / feel unfulfilled.

(And if you are equating goodness with intimacy and you only have a few friends who you can talk about certain topics with, this is yet another reason certain deep topics will end up dominating your conversations.)

If we merge this model with the idea of separation, we can see that separation is likely good because it, in a way, allows us to reset the set point of our hedonic treadmill. Sort of like how some people will switch up their productivity drugs to avoid getting addicted / losing the potency of their drugs.

And it does look like this works, at least for the brain. Meaning that the question of separation might even have some sort of empirical answer—EX: “Alice and Bob should spend 68 hours away from one another to fully maximize their hedonic returns upon reconvening”.

Nevermindhowfrighteningthatsounds.

(“For the glory of empiricism!”)

Ahem. So, yeah, back to novelty. There’s also some toy models behind why novelty fades / why it was helpful in the past.

For example, if you always let yourself get distracted by the way that the grass shines in the morning light for the 300th morning in a row, you might miss the moment when the tiger—oh, guess that’s new too—pounces on you.

Right, so one reason we stop noticing things which are constant in the environment is because they likely aren’t going to be the things killing us, seeing as they didn’t kill us in the past. In the modern day, this also leads to things like boredom with things like tape cassettes because better alternatives are available. I’m worried about the constant steady stream of reinforcement from things like Facebook accelerating the rate at which we acclimate to stimuli…

But now we’re getting quite off-topic. Back to the philosophical implications of novelty:

Given that many of my goals (make more people healthy, write exciting stories, etc.) seem to require things to change, I think that seeking novelty is good. Tempering that, of course, with my vague fears that society is letting novelty fade too quickly.

With regards to interpersonal relationships, I think that stagnant relationships are ones which can suffer more. So in the antifragile spirit, doing new things seems good.

But.

But I’d also like to just sometimes sit in silence, to be stable while everything around us changes. There’s something comforting about running through the same grooves again. Sometimes, it’s fun to repeat things. (…”and do it again!”)

I think that, if I were to prioritize between novelty and stability, I’d bias more towards stability. For me personally, I don’t think I handle change as well; I think life has enough tumult as it is, and having friends as bedrocks is nice.

So I guess, I’m largely fine if conversations circle back to the same topic. I suppose that I’d tire of it at some point, and then maybe it’d be good to explore some of the tactics outlined in 1].

As for seeking novelty… I think, in a semi-mindful spirit, there’s a lot more to pay attention to that we already miss. Looking at the nuances is an appreciative stance I choose to take.