Death by a Thousand Platitudes 

“You must love meeting new people”. This is something people (apparently) adamantly believe about Uber drivers. The money¹ is secondary, really, to the opportunity to spend on average 15 minutes with 20 or so strangers a day. This must be true for some drivers, solely because of the sheer amount of people that believe it so. I enjoy the gig, but the culture and wit of the general public has nothing to do with it.

 I usually respond, “yeah”, or, “I guess so”, in a voice with bemused-like wonder. The impending conversations are brutal. It’s the same conversation 20 times a day. I know these people, generally, mean well. I know they aren’t intentionally rhetorically waterboarding me. This is how it goes:

Passenger gets in. “Hey how’s it going”, I say. And this is really more of a neutral greeting, an acknowledgement of their existence, really, than it is an attempt to really find out how their life is going. A trip across town is hardly the occasion for real connection. 

I have to say something, don’t I? I’ve never liked the idea of telling anyone good morning, and a simple  “hey”, or “hi” seems sociopathic. So I do the thing we all do and ask them how they are doing. And  they play the game too.

Usually they greet me in the same nebulous and indistinct manner. I am always perfectly content to end the verbal portion of our contract here. 

My best case scenario at this moment is for the passenger to immediately dive into their phone. And while this does happen, what happens more at this point is the avalanche of platitudes. Things passengers can’t possibly care about, but the social contract demands they ask. 

“You been busy today?
“So how long you been driving?”
“You do this full time?”
“What’s your craziest story?”

On top of those, tourists have even more in their toolbox. I become an emissary for their Nashville experience. I’m going to unlock the secrets of Nashville for them. They need to know:

“Where should we eat?”
“Where should we avoid?”
“Where do the locals hang out?”
“Nashville is growing, huh?”

 And finally, the coup de grâce—”what’s the ONE thing we HAVE to do while we’re in Nashville?” This last one is particularly brutal. My answer has become so boilerplate, and so uninspired I often feel bad after I drop them off. I could have given more effort, I think to myself,  and letting someone down that’s on vacation elicits a special type of dejection. I read from a script, essentially². So I rattle off some answers. Standardized answers. I have one restaurant, one park (experience, or thing to do), I dodge the question of where to avoid because the socioeconomic implications of that question will quickly dawn on both parties, and I tell them locals hang out in East Nashville.³

Platitudes are a plague. Having the same conversation over-and-over must be killing them too, right? Are they asking their next driver the same questions and compiling a spreadsheet with the most inane data known to man? We’re all reading from a script. All of us, all day. Think about it. Throughout your day how many completely robotic responses are you giving? Sometimes I think 90% of what I say is entirely automated. But an alternative isn’t clear. Silence, genuine engagement everytime (with a stranger), I don’t think so. These nothing-things we say just come out. It’s hardwired into us to ward off uncomfortable silences, and perceived rudeness. I know it’s hardwired because of the lengths passengers have gone to ask them. In the height of the pandemic—masks and windows down—these people would essentially be forced to scream “SO HOW LONG YOU BEEN DRIVING TODAY?”, and they all did. It became a running gag for me to see just how far people would go to get these questions out. Far. Nothing got in these people’s way, it became admirable, sort of. 

There are outliers. I’ve had incredibly satisfying and enlightening encounters with passengers, but these are exceptional cases. And a disproportionate amount of these exceptions are passengers that are also uber drivers, and the engaging conversation we have is entirely venting about the idiots we pick up. 

 It seems we have two options, automated conversations, or the unbearable weight of silence. Look, in my idyllic and socialist dreams all we talk about with one another are the books we’re reading. Until then just make sure you’re up to date on the script. If the system breaks down, and you find yourself under the burden of silence, take a deep breath—and look at your phone.

1. thousands and thousands of dollars
2. it’s not just the banality of this question that makes it awful.Its often asked just as we arrive at their destination, giving me only seconds to think about it, hence The Script
3. East Nashville is incredibly touristy. It’s depressingly touristy