“How are you?” “Fine.” The whole exchange takes about two seconds and neither person is really participating in it. It’s a handshake. A clearing of the throat before the actual conversation. The “how are you” isn’t really a question and the “fine” isn’t really an answer and both people know this and proceed accordingly. We have collectively decided that the honest answer to how are you is not something you lead with, not something you owe a stranger, not something you unpack at the start of a meeting with fourteen agenda items.
But fine covers a lot of territory. There’s the fine that means actually pretty good, just understating it in the way you do when things are going well and you don’t want to seem like you’re making too much of it. There’s the fine that means holding it together, which is doing real structural work — holding together what exactly being left deliberately vague. There’s the fine that means please don’t ask me right now, which is the most common one, the one that closes a door politely without slamming it.
The worst is when someone actually stops and says “no really, how are you” and makes eye contact and means it and you’ve said fine so many times in a row that the honest answer has gotten a little rusty. You have to locate it, dust it off, figure out if you actually trust this person with it or if you’re going to give them a slightly more detailed version of fine and call it honesty. Sometimes the question lands at exactly the wrong moment — right when the fine is barely holding — and you have to work quite hard to not answer it truthfully in a parking lot.
The people who always answer honestly are remarkable and also slightly exhausting in a way you’re not supposed to say. You asked and they told you, which is technically the correct social behavior and also means you’re now standing somewhere having a real conversation when you were prepared for a two-second exchange. You recalibrate. You try to be present. You realize you actually needed this more than you knew, which was probably why they answered honestly in the first place. They could tell.
Someone asked me today and I said fine and it was the fine that means something is sitting on me that I haven’t dealt with yet and I’m not sure I have the language for it and this is not the moment. They nodded and we moved on. That was the right call. Sometimes fine is the kindest thing you can say — to them, to yourself, to the version of the conversation that doesn’t have room for the real one. The real one can wait. Fine holds the place until it’s ready.