By Autum Dierking
Everyone has experienced it. That awkward moment when you pass an acquaintance in the hallway and are faced with a dilemma: Say hello? Or just to pretend like you didn't see him or her at all (and act like you didn't actually sit directly behind that person in a class for the entire past semester)? Should you choose to engage in the risky social behavior that is exchanging hallway hellos, it usually goes something like this:
"Hey." "Oh. Hi." "How's it going?" "Good." (Walk by quickly without further interaction.)
At this point, you're lucky to be asked how you are doing in reply. And you're even luckier if the person asking really even remotely cares about your answer.
Have we, as a generation, grown accustomed to a certain level of conversational apathy? Do we care what anyone else has to say anymore? Or are we so focused on our own lives, that we remain indifferent to everyone else?
In a recent article published in USA Today, columnist Craig Wilson outlined a nationwide epidemic he called "me-ism." He defined me-ism as the tendency to talk purely about yourself and in doing so, forego asking questions of your conversation partner. Wilson conducted an experiment in which he asked his conversation partners as many questions about themselves as he could think of. He would then sit and wait for them to reciprocate.
Often it would never happen.
A few weeks ago, psychologists at San Diego State University published a research article which demonstrated that our generation is the more self-absorbed than any other ever was. (See previous Beacon article "You probably think this article is about you".) They claim that college-aged students are so wrapped up in their own lives and successes that they tend not to notice those of anyone else.
In a time when individuals seem more and more apt to follow the "every-man-for-himself" doctrine, how can we function as members of a local or global community if we don't care about the lives of individuals within it? I see this as a challenge. I'm going to do what I can to break out of my own self-absorbed bubble.
The next time I pass an acquaintance in the hallway, I'm going to ask them how they are, and I'm going to really listen. I'm going to step past the self-centered tendencies forced upon me by an individualistic society and try to care more about everyone else and what they have to say. I'm going to try to prove those researchers wrong by demonstrating that I can live a life not entirely spent focusing on myself.
If everyone took on challenges like this one, could we drag ourselves out of our narcissistic existences and into lives filled with compassion, empathy and productive interactions?
I'm not sure I'm quite that optimistic.
At the very least though, making the effort to care about the answers to those obligatory "hallway how are yous" could be a step in the right direction.
