ask a man how his day's been going
I love asking people how their day has been going. Sometimes all you want to communicate to someone are the following pieces of information:
- you don't want to supplant whatever it is that's currently on their mind by providing accidental cycle-eating detail, even in question form.
- you care about the little snapshot of them that's visible to you right now, and you should feel invited to leverage the conversational resources I'm currently allocating towards that care.
The Nonspecific Question deserves your respect
Really asking how someone's day has been going is just one face of the many-faced god known as the Nonspecific Question. We all know her.
- What's up? (or, How's it hanging, what's shaking, the sundry <question word> <gerund> variants)
- Tuesday, huh? (any sufficiently question-like acknowledgment of common circumstance counts for this)
- How are you? / How are you doing? / How do you do?
The Nonspecific Question is a beautiful god. I smile when I see her face, or those of her siblings. In the war on small talk, I stand with the small talk; let not the warring hordes mistake my milieu (autistic people who like supplanting common convention in favor of intentionally designed protocols and systems) for my affiliations (autistic people who like putting extant protocols and systems under a microscope, or maybe sometimes a focusing lens under strong sunlight). I wish always to ask, what is this for?
(it is a destructive impulse, and a brutal war.)
The Nonspecific Question gets a bad rap
Of the various forms of small talk I've been able to identify in the wild over my years1 of study, the Nonspecific Question is probably the worst for its utility vs. the animus it inspires. To those who find themselves at a loss when asked The Question, I wish to say: I understand. You are not used to merely reporting the contents of your mind. It feels unsafe. Sometimes it is unsafe! Or at least, inappropriate. It may often seem like I'm not actually saving you the burden of extra decisions when I ask you in this way to report on your thoughts, because there's still a filter you need those thoughts through, that you have to go to the trouble of activating.
Fortunately, there is an easy answer to this conundrum! You have a low-effort, low-compute, reliable way of answering both the letter and the spirit of the question! You can provide, at a stroke, both pieces of information I'm looking for, use the resources I'm committing to you as needed, and set us both up to let this conversation be exactly as long as would please us both best!
Just tell me how you feel right now
What's your body doing? Are you hungry? Tired? Sore? Are you stressed? Strung out? Happy? Overwhelmed? Excited? Harassed? How much noise is your mind making? Are you full of tasks right now? Have you been distracted all day? Are you juggling six things and they're all going round-robin on your phone as you make space for the next little bit of each of them? Are you chewing on something big? Something little? Are you numb? Disconnected? Foggy? Do you know how you're feeling right now?2
Of these questions, which answer is most salient to your experience right now? What would serve as the best characterization of your experience? Is there a different question than any of these whose answer would be the best characterization?
If we stood here while I go through this checklist (which of course is incomplete, for reasons of that last question), we'd both be running through a lot more time, context, and brain space than either of us probably want to devote to a quick check in.
Why this works
The pragmatics of the Nonspecific Question are almost always the same. When I ask how your day is going, I'm asking because I like cheap, easy quests to make my friends' and neighbors' day better. I like finding and completing these quests because I like seeing my people happy and well cared for.
As far as I can tell, this is why everybody asks it, not just me. People have various levels of acculturation habit, social smoothing, that all dope the results, of course; I don't mean to dismiss the confounds. The bet I am willing to make is that there is always a price that a Nonspecific Asker is, at time of asking, willing to pay to make your life better, and both of you will feel good about the interaction if you can achieve market clearing on this.
"Tell me how you feel" may not always work, but I think this more general principle actually does always apply. Applying it directly gives you a different, higher-effort heuristic: answer the question as if I'm offering to spend something like five minutes of my time making your life easier, making you happier, or caring for you how you'd like to be cared for.
P.S.: Convention is the bailout
By convention: person A asks a Nonspecific Question, person B replies with a Nonspecific Answer, and then both parties run the ritual in reverse. This low-effort exchange is intended, but not required, to create a moment of connection. Treat it as a bailout: you both have nothing more to offer or expect from each other at present. Move on; it is a low cost to pay to seed the social ground with opportunities for the richer thing.