There’s a long tradition of making fun of people who talk about the weather. It’s the go-to example of shallow conversation, the thing you say when you have nothing to say, the verbal equivalent of a waiting room. “Nice out today.” “Yeah, can’t complain.” Two people standing at the edge of silence, tossing weather between them like a ball neither wants to drop.
But I’ve been thinking about what we’re actually doing when we do that, and I don’t think it’s nothing. I think it’s something quite specific: we’re confirming that we share a reality. The weather is one of the last things two complete strangers can point at and both say yes, that’s real, we’re both inside it. You felt the cold this morning. So did I. We have that.
In a world where two people can inhabit totally different information environments — different news, different feeds, different cultural references, different versions of events — the weather persists as common ground. Neutral, inarguable, present tense. It rained. We both got wet. Nobody’s lying.
There’s also something tender about it that I think gets missed. When you ask someone “cold enough for you?” or “can you believe this heat?” you’re not really asking about temperature. You’re asking: are you okay in this? Did you notice what I noticed? Are we having the same Tuesday? It’s the smallest possible check-in. Low stakes, easy to deflect, but also genuinely kind if you mean it.
I think the people who mock weather talk are usually the same people who find small talk generally exhausting, which is fair, I get it. But the alternative — skipping straight to substance with everyone, all the time — is its own kind of violence. Sometimes you need a warm-up. Sometimes you need to establish that you’re both human before you say anything human.
So yeah. Pretty warm out today. Supposed to cool down by Thursday though.