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The story
“Isn’t the only point of talking to someone to become closer with them?” A question posted to 5ch’s Newsspeed VIP board sparked a long back-and-forth. The thread’s original poster repeated the claim that “even if there are benefits, that’s all conversation really amounts to,” while other posters pushed back with arguments like “you can learn things you didn’t know” and “you can gain insights.” The discussion gradually shifted into a semantic battle over the difference between “meaningless” and “not feeling the need for it,” and the two sides never reached common ground.
What people said
Is there any benefit besides getting closer?
I'm the one who brought up intellectual curiosity, and you're the one who threw in the baffling afterthought that "a conversation that satisfies intellectual curiosity isn't really a conversation."
For example, gaining some kind of insight.
Oh, you're another one who doesn't get it. I never said anything about what's necessary for a conversation.
No, that's not what I meant either. If you don't feel conversation has meaning, I wanted to know what you think is unnecessary versus necessary. It's not about what's needed for a conversation.
I never said conversation is meaningless. I'm just asking what meaning it has beyond getting closer to someone.
There's a chance you can learn something you didn't know.
"Meaningless" and "not feeling the meaning" are different things. I want to know why it seems to you that there's no meaning beyond getting closer.
Isn't that included under "getting closer"?
Don't you think there's no actual need to get closer? I'm not just playing word games here.
Do you mean "there's no need to attach the meaning of getting closer to conversation," or do you mean "even without getting closer, conversation still has meanings like not making enemies, so you don't need to talk in order to get closer"? I used the phrase "you can enjoy benefits," but I'm not saying I only have practical gain in mind when I talk to people. I'm simply saying that's about all the meaning conversation has.
Hypothetically, if there's someone you have no desire to get closer to, do you think there's no meaning in talking to them?
For the first question, it's the former. And it comes down to whether you equate "meaning" with "necessity." What I want to get at is how a person comes across and is treated by others, from a third party's point of view.
I've got about five, yeah.
Depends on the degree, but that's within the range of being justifiable, I guess.
Then it's fine, isn't it? If you had nobody, that'd be rough, and people would say "build some relationships first before you say that." But if you do have people, then it's just a normal thing to say "talking with people you're not close to or don't click with isn't fun."
Calling that meaningless is you rejecting other people. Just because you're not interested in something doesn't mean nobody is.
It's pretty ironic that someone who doesn't correctly understand my argument is the one saying that.
What exactly are you arguing? Could you lay it out clearly for me?
That response tells me you're not getting my point either. Have you tried thinking from someone else's perspective?
What exactly is your point, I wonder? At the very least, responding to "I see no meaning whatsoever in learning about someone I'm not interested in" with "just because you're not interested in something doesn't mean nobody is" makes it seem like you're not even trying to have a real conversation with me.
By the way, what makes you become interested in someone in the first place? Surely you'll answer that much.
I'm saying it's weird because you're presenting your personal opinion — that there's no point talking about things you're not interested in — as if it were a general rule.
I never said there's no point in talking about it. I'm just saying that even if you did, it would have no meaning to me. Take weather forecasts — they matter a lot to people who live in or plan to visit that area, and they don't matter to people who don't. I'm only saying something that obvious. I've completely lost interest in you since you can't even grasp something this simple. That's all there is to it.
No, that's exactly the point — you're limiting yourself to just "meaning." The way you jump straight to thinking other people are stupid is exactly what's creating your tunnel vision. Meaning, in the end, is always something added after the fact.
If you read back through the log you'll see I never needed anyone to sympathize with me — I welcome even negative opinions. If your reading comprehension is so poor that you can't even follow what I'd call completely ordinary reading comprehension, I suppose even this explanation still isn't enough for you.
I see, so it's basically a question you don't want to answer because it's inconvenient for you, got it. In other words, whenever something's inconvenient for you, you interpret it as the other person lacking intelligence to justify yourself. That's how you probably operate in real life too — you cope with the fact that other people aren't interested in you by chalking it up to their poor reading comprehension, putting others down to prop yourself up.
Even going back through the log, you're dodging every single point people actually want answered lol. This thread's just here to rub people the wrong way, isn't it?
Background and Key Points of This Debate
This thread is a textbook example of how the kind of talking-past-each-other over definitions that’s common on anonymous forums can escalate. The original poster never budged from the premise that “conversation has no meaning beyond getting closer to someone,” while those pushing back treated “meaning,” “necessity,” and “value” as separate concepts — and this mismatch in terminology is a big part of why the discussion never quite connected. Because text-only exchanges don’t convey tone of voice or facial expression, minor nitpicks over wording are easily read as personal attacks, and as the thread went on, the focus shifted away from the actual content toward repeatedly questioning whether the other side had correctly understood one’s argument. There’s no clear right answer to a philosophical question like this one, and the two sides never closed the gap between their positions.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Newsspeed VIP) thread “What’s the Point of Talking to Other People?“
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