I went to a party, if you can call it that, halfway sponsored by a venture fund that I won't name, filled with people I hope desperately I can forget. The girls, mostly Asian Americans who went to some combination of MIT and Berkeley, smiled gummy smiles and spoke either inarticulately quiet, below the 2010s music, or far too loud. The guys, a mixture of Caucasian, Indian, and Chinese, all wore startup merch. Conversation felt like choosing key words from an online randomizer. Blankets? Yes, of course. I have recently bought blankets as well. I spent 15 minutes listening to a conversation on if cauliflower was a better vegetable than a bean sprout. Someone brought a robotic dog. I sipped my seltzer in the corner (the fund had bought alcohol, but no one was drinking out of fear of disrupting their Whoop) and pretended to use the restroom to escape the conversation four times.
One guy walks up to me. He's about 5'7", says he's 26, but could pass for 16 with the youthful, collagen-dense skin of a Cupertino Asian. He's wearing a Georgia Tech t-shirt that hangs a little too loose on his skinny frame, and his black backpack has Google printed on the lowest pocket. He has a sparse mustache wandering across his philtrum and his chapped lips ask me what I'm building. Upon my answer, his eyes begin to skim the room just behind me, pupils scanning from left to right. His mouth continues to move, monosyllabic voice drowning the space between us with factoids about how long he's been in the city. He pauses to ask me if I'm on X, hoping there will be at least a follower he can take from this interaction. I imagine myself plucking a hair from his perfectly trimmed head, black strands straight out of the top like grass. I tell him I don't have X.
Make awkward eye contact with the 19 year old by the folding table, who is busy talking about raising a seed round. How was your week? He says good, how was yours? And what are you building? And how long have you been in the city for? And who do you know here? His eyes are unblinking, and his White Claw is unsipped. Neither of us seems to know why we're in this one bedroom apartment, on the 7th floor of a random building too close to the Tenderloin, with no music and vegetable plates that were obviously pulled out for this party of 40 strangers. The microcosm of the conversation represents much of the city.
Where are you from? What are you doing? The purpose of these questions, of questions generally, is not actually to find out where you're from and what you're doing. The purpose is to banter. Oh, you're from Boston? You must consider yourself lucky to have escaped the storm. Attendees tend to be bad at follow-ups because they have no opinions. They have prepared factual answers to the most commonly asked questions, and they are out of practice in generating beyond those. So there is no banter, only the regurgitated question-answer routine.
Occasionally, you'll meet someone who has prepared something novel. They have a vendetta against ketchup, or they just went to Thailand. And you'll ask them about it, and they'll flounder, then skip to the next topic or deflect the question to you. This is someone with a script. Equipped with something to say, then a blank stare for whatever is said in return. Conversation is a dance. You can't dance simply by learning all the moves, and in fact, the difficult part is not learning the moves. The difficult part is to string all of the moves together, hear the music, and to do it with verve.
The 19-year-old knows this, I think, in the way he shifts his weight when the silence stretches too long, reaching for his White Claw and then not drinking it. He wants something to happen. So do I. We just can't figure out who's supposed to move first, and so we stand there, two people who have learned that you're supposed to want this - the party, the network, the conversation - without learning how to actually want it.
I tell him it was nice to meet him, and he says likewise, and both of us try very hard to mean it.