I’m not sure why I do what I do. Most of my life is on autopilot. Words and gestures comes to me without thought, and I rarely question them after they happen. The purposes which lie underneath the words and gestures are subtle, even to me, and I can only recognize them looking back.

“Hi,” I say to my friend who’s working on computer code in his room. I stop outside his room so he knows I’m talking to him, and I face him so he knows I’m interested in his reply. “How’d you sleep?”

“Good,” he says back, turning away from his computer in a way that lets me know that his attention is now on me, and no longer on his work. “I had a weird dream last night, though.”

“Oh, did you?” I say. I say it in a tone and manner that implies slight curiosity, giving him an excuse to tell me about if he’d like to but making it clear that I don’t actually care that much.

“Yeah,” he says, “really strange.” It looks as if he considers telling me about the dream, then he realizes that, despite his desire to tell me, he realizes it would be an unfair imposition to tell me if I don’t have particular interest.

“Cool,” I say, even though I don’t think it actually is. “I’m going out to lunch, would you like to join me?” This is a good gesture. Not only does it let him know that I wish to spend more time with him, which is nice of me, but it also lets him know that I’m considering his hunger and his possible desire for friendly companionship.

“No, I’m good. I have a sandwich in the fridge. Thank you, though.” This ends our social interaction.

“Bye,” I say, to confirm the end of the social interaction, and walk away.

Of course, none of this actually goes through my mind during this brief interaction. As I said, I run on autopilot, and all of these social skills and norms are so engrained in me that I have to pay attention to notice them.

But sometimes I do notice them, usually when a social situation deviates from the norm. If I make a joke and the other person doesn’t laugh but seems upset or panicked, I’ll worry over the joke. I’ll attempt to fix my mistake in that conversation, I’ll inquire obliquely about why they didn’t appreciate the joke. If that doesn’t work, I might worry about the miffed social interaction for hours afterwards, turning over in my head how I meant the joke versus how they might have taken it. I have to try to enter their head, see how they view the world, walk in their shoes.

Of course, that’s the basic problem. I can only analyze how they might have taken it through the way I might have felt about it. There’s no rulebook about social interactions, at least none that covers anything more than generalities. Social interactions are entirely implicit, governed by culturally-specific, occasionally stringent rules that are only rarely laid out. We have to learn them through experience and generally without anyone specifically teaching us.

It’s strange to have to think about social interactions normal to us from another’s perspective. Online, I found a guide to European visitors on how to handle social interactions in America. It warned Europeans that Americans often use “How are you?” as a greeting rather than an interrogative, that an answer isn’t always expected.

Which is true, but something that I never thought about. I just incorporated it into my daily interactions, assimilated it like I did so many other context-specific phrases and words. It made me wonder, however, how many Europeans I’ve confused over my life by saying “How are you?” in passing, walking away while they hurriedly tried to come up with an answer.

And, on the flip side, it made me wonder how many social interactions I’ve misunderstood, how many gestures I’ve misinterpreted. I’m reminded of my brother making a joke about his 9th grade teacher being fat to his 9th grade English teacher, then being shocked when she wrote him up.

“But she laughed!” he protested. “How could she have been mad if she laughed?” My brother had learned laughter was a positive thing, that a joke went over well if the recipient laughed. He hadn’t yet learned that for some people, laughing and snarling could be practically interchangeable.

So how do we learn these things? My brother learned his lesson by being forced to write an essay about how the simile “My teacher is overweight like an overstuffed pillow” is inappropriate. Interestingly, the explicit lesson taught by his English teacher was only that commenting on a woman’s weight is inappropriate, which is a cultural norm only true in cultures where women are encouraged to be thin. The more subtle and perhaps universal underlying lesson, that laughter is not always an encouragement, was one that had to be inferred.

This makes me think that human beings must have an innate ability to infer from specific circumstances to universal rules. If you train a dog not to jump up on the kitchen table and eat your dinner, he will only infer that to your specific kitchen table (as I can attest from experience, having lost an entire roast duck to a Labrador Retriever). However, young kids must infer that, for instance, they must use cutlery at every kitchen table, that if it is inappropriate to eat steak with your hands at your own house, then it is inappropriate to pick up a fish cutlet at your aunt’s house.

Of course the ability to make these inferences is not equal among all people, especially if the signals are more subtle. Hence the existence of “charmers”, “ladies’ men”, and all others renowned for their social skills. There are many social interactions to successfully navigate in order to successfully romance a woman or close a business deal, and the existence of well-attended, expensive seminars to accomplish both of these objectives suggests the difficulty of navigating each social interaction successfully.

So the next time you see someone in the street, and say “Hi!” or wave or ask them how their day was, think of why you’re doing it, and what you are expecting to get out of it. Ask yourself what your purpose was, and if the same purpose could be accomplished in a different way. Until then, I’m going to have to finish this essay and say goodbye to you, dear reader. In this manner, I’ve made a somewhat artificial connection with you, complimented you, and hopefully established a relationship which will keep you coming back to my writings. In this manner, I also close this interaction, and therefore free myself to move on with my day.