The ‘How are you?’ trap. You know it. Someone says it. You say, ‘I’m good, how are you?’ They say, ‘Good!’ And that’s it. That’s the whole conversation. It’s a social formality, a conversational tic. But what if you’re *not* good? What if you want to launch into a thirty-minute monologue about your existential dread and the slow decay of society? No, you can’t. Because then you’ve violated the unspoken ‘How are you?’ contract. You’ve introduced ‘actual information’ into the ‘polite pleasantry’ zone. And then everyone gets uncomfortable. It’s a question nobody wants the real answer to. It’s a question designed to keep us all in a shallow, polite holding pattern, avoiding any genuine human connection. It’s a lie we all tell each other, every single day!
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