General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Baby boomers are killing themselves at an alarming rate, raising question: Why? [View all]wickerwoman
(5,662 posts)I think most people are just desperately trying to avoid awkward conversational pauses with strangers and so they fish around for a topic that can be expanded on. "What do you do?" usually provokes easy follow-up questions or provides an easy way to segue into "Oh, do you travel a lot for that job?" or "What did you study in school/How did you get into that". It's essentially asking "How do you spend most of your waking hours?"
For some of us, the answer we have to give is quite boring and technical (I'm with you on that one), but eyes aren't glazing over because people aren't impressed by where we fall on the social hierarchy. It's because it's hard to get laypeople to understand what we do in a few sentences and so they can't come up with that follow-up question that keeps the conversation going. Their eyes are glazing over in despair because they can see that awkward pause coming and they can't think of how to fill it.