While masking on the whole gets easier with age, the absolute slog that is smalltalk is only getting more painful with each repetition.
I am 25yo. Before age of 6, all conversations were pre-analitical brain. ¨But ever since then, you had to have the same exact conversation about what? 20 times a day?
I literally cannot even think of talking to my mom about anything, since I know, she will literally just be returning a rating from "that's good" to a bad rating of "you'll be fine".
That's not a conversation. SHE'S A LITERAL NPC with such a limited number of lines, I can just hard code it in 10 minutes.
@LukeAlmighty I know people who are NPCs who will just respond the exact same way to things every time lol. There's a dude I work with who, every time it is raining, will tell several people "it's wonderful weather for frogs" and now that line is stuck in my head in the same way that "stop, you violated the law!" is.
Just yesterday my boss said something about me over the phone and then proceeded to say how I was ignoring her by not saying anything, but the truth is that I just really had nothing to say.