The Secret to Mastering the Art of Small Talk Idle chitchat confers serious health benefits. Here’s how to rebuild your social muscles after months of isolation. We spent waaaay too much time cooped up inside with our families, with our partners, or by ourselves for the past year and a half. While that meant a total loss of solitude for some of us—and an abundance of it for others—quarantine also meant the disappearance of something we didn’t know we needed: random, chance encounters with other people. And science has shown that those fleeting conversations with the grocery-store clerk or a friend of a friend are actually really good for you.