Networking for people who find it pointless

I grew up in what social scientists call a "coconut culture." Hard on the outside, soft on the inside — meaning people don't open up easily to strangers, but once they do, they really do. You don't get a warm smile and a compliment to your blouse on day one, yet, once you are in, you are staying at my house wherever you are in town.

Where I come from, community support was real and close. You relied on people around you — for food, for transport, for navigating bureaucracy, for just getting through the week. But these were people you actually knew. People who were in your life because life had put them there, not because you'd strategically maintained a connection. If you needed help, you called someone. And they came. Not because of a LinkedIn message from six months ago, but because that's what you did for each other. 

You have a village for you, and you are the village for others. That kind of interdependence is demanding yet warm. It's also completely different from networking.

The thing about loose connections

Networking, as most career advice describes it, is essentially about keeping people loosely in your orbit. You chat occasionally. You comment on their posts. You have a coffee once a year. You are not close. You are not really in each other's lives. But when the moment comes — when you're looking for a job, or need an introduction, or want to make something happen — that loose thread is still there, and you pull it.

For a long time, this made no sense to me at all. The idea of maintaining a connection not because this person matters to you today, but because they might someday — it felt a little transactional. A little dishonest, even. Like treating people as contingency plans.

And on top of that: the effort. Keeping up small talk with someone you haven't seen in eight months about their holiday, their dog, their kitchen renovation. Finding something warm to say. Leaving enough of an impression to be remembered, but not being so intense that you make it weird.

That was exhausting.

Risk aversion as a class instinct

Here's something I've come to understand about myself only later: if you grow up without a safety net, you get very good at calculating returns on effort.

When every action costs something — time, energy, money you don't have — you learn quickly not to invest in things with uncertain outcomes. You wait until the outcome is clear. You act when it counts. Spending energy on something that might maybe eventually be useful feels like a luxury you can't afford.

Networking, in this framing, is basically the opposite of everything that made sense to me growing up.

And yet — the higher you go in your career, the more it matters. Not because the world is unfair (though it is), but because at a certain level, competence is assumed. What people are actually evaluating is whether they can work with you, whether they trust you, whether they enjoy being in the room with you. And they can only know that if they've been in the room with you.

And that small talk about the weekend is an assessment of how safe you are. So here we are.

So here is what helped me go through networking easier:

Small talk is a safety check, not a waste of time.

Before any real conversation can happen, both people are quietly asking: is this person safe to be around? Are they aggressive? Strange? Going to make this uncomfortable? Will they respect my time?

Small talk is the protocol that runs before the real thing. It's not meaningless - it's a check that both of you need to pass for each other before anything deeper can happen. Talking about the weekend is not the point. The point is: we are both still here, this is fine, we can continue.

You don't have to talk about yourself. You can talk about what you care about.

Networking advice often says: "talk yourself up." I find this nearly impossible. I'm not built for self-promotion, and I notice when other people do it in a way that feels hollow.

But I can talk about a project I found interesting. A problem I'm thinking about. A book that changed how I see something. My field, the people I work with, something I'm trying to figure out. That's not promotion — it's just being a person with a perspective. And it's actually much more memorable than a job title.

The ball needs to land somewhere they can pick it up.

One of the things I had to learn is that a conversation is not a monologue taking turns. It has to go somewhere, and you are partially responsible for making that easy. When you're talking, you're not just expressing yourself — you're leaving small openings. Hooks. Things the other person can grab onto, respond to, expand on. A question with a real answer. An opinion that invites a reaction. A small personal detail that makes you real instead of a job function.

Think of it less like a tennis serve and more like a football pass — you want to put it somewhere they can actually run with it. Not too hard, not behind them. Somewhere they can go.

Finding value in the connection itself is a skill, not a personality trait.

This one is still genuinely hard for me. But I've noticed that it gets easier when I stop trying to see the conversation as an investment and start being curious about the person instead. Not: how might this person be useful to me one day. But: what's actually going on for them? What are they working on? What kind of world do they live in?

Curiosity is a much more comfortable motivation than strategy. And it tends to produce better conversations, which means people actually remember them.

It becomes way easier once you have that safety net

One thing I didn't expect: networking becomes significantly less stressful once you're not doing it from a place of need. When you are looking for a job, or trying to get a promotion, or quietly worried about your position — every conversation carries too much weight. The stakes feel enormous. You're not just having a coffee, you're potentially changing your life. That kind of pressure doesn't make for relaxed small talk.

But when you start building connections before you need them — when you're reasonably settled, not desperate, just curious — the whole thing changes texture. You can actually be present. You can ask questions because you're interested, not because you're fishing. You can let a conversation go nowhere without feeling like you've wasted your only chance. The safety net doesn't just make life easier in general. It makes networking easier too, because you stop treating every interaction like it has to count.

If this sounds familiar

If you've ever found networking exhausting, hollow, or vaguely embarrassing — that's not a character flaw. It's often a reflection of where you come from and what you learned to value.

Real connection, earned trust, knowing people who will actually show up — these are good instincts. They don't disappear. They just need a slightly different shape when the environment changes.

You don't have to love networking. You just have to understand what it's actually for — and then, slowly, find your own way of doing it that doesn't make you want to go home and lie down.

That's where most of us are. And that's fine.