How Are You?

How are you?

I think those three words make up the most often asked question there is and I don’t care where you live, how old you are or any other factor. It will be asked today in Toms River, Tuckerton, Trenton, Tallahassee, Tuscaloosa, Texas, Tokyo, Turkey & Thailand. Of course in some of those places they speak a different language so it won’t sound the same but regardless of translation we know the meaning of the question.

Don’t ask me what made me think about this for a topic because the answer many people give is automatic….in other words they don’t really tell the truth. My guess is the response most heard after “How are you” is something like, “Fine or good, how about you?

My take is that’s the answer you give when you really don’t want to give an answer so you throw it back to the person asking the question. In other words, like a true politician you basically ask a question to dodge one in the hopes that the original question is forgotten by the time somebody answers the question you gave them in response to their question. Yes I know this is confusing but not only is “how are you” asked repeatedly during the day but the responses usually come without any thought or reflection but rather are triggered by some kind of automatic thing in our brain.

Let me try and clarify because I can see I’m getting nowhere fast. If I ask right now “how are you?” isn’t it likely you will give me a quick response that is really not an answer but actually just a conditioned….response. Here are the ones we would get most often (besides fine, how about you?).

Great, things could not be better.
I’m good, thanks for asking.
Hanging in there
I guess things could be worse

Obviously I started with the answer you get from someone with a smile and ended with one in which they might shrug their shoulders. Truth is I bet we
get the real answer less than half by time. Finally do we really care what the answer is because honestly we only asked because it seemed like the right thing to say. By the way, “I’m lousy…how about you.”