The Neon Void: Why I Dread the Standard Greeting

しんじつ – あいさつ

truth \neq greeting

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It was 2:30 a.m. in Shinjuku. The Yamanote line had stopped running hours ago, trapping everyone exactly where they were until dawn. The rain was coming down in sheets, turning the street outside the 24-hour diner into a mirror reflecting the bleeding red and blue neon of the surrounding signs.

I was sitting in a vinyl booth, watching a drop of condensation slide down the side of a glass of iced oolong tea. The air smelled faintly of stale cigarette smoke and fried garlic.

An acquaintance from a life I used to live—someone I hadn’t seen in three years—walked in, shook the rain off his umbrella, and spotted me. He slid into the booth across from me, exhausted, and threw the inevitable harpoon: “How’s it going?”

I felt that familiar, microscopic tightening in my chest. If I were a character in a movie, this would be the moment the soundtrack cuts to static.

There is one question I have come to deeply resent, not because it is malicious, but because it is completely empty.

1. The Vending Machine Script

“How’s it going?” is not a question. It is a social transaction.

When people ask it, they aren’t looking for a map of your internal landscape. They are inserting a coin into a vending machine, expecting a highly specific, universally accepted canned beverage of a response. They want acoustic confirmation that the social contract is still intact.

• The Reflex: “It’s going.”
• The Reality: It is always going. Time is moving. The earth is spinning in the dark. My heart is beating an involuntary rhythm. To say “it’s going” is to say absolutely nothing at all.

It is a conversation that consumes oxygen but produces zero heat. It is a placeholder for a connection that neither party is quite brave enough to actually initiate.

2. The Fluctuation of the Ghost

The truth is always a gradient. Sometimes it is better; sometimes it is worse.

My life is not a steady state. It is a series of erratic weather patterns. Some days I am a calm harbor; other days I am a house with the windows blown out by a typhoon. But when you are asked “How’s it going?”, there is no room for the weather. You are expected to report a “Fair and Sunny” forecast, even if you are standing in a flood.

The question demands a mask. It asks you to edit the sprawling, chaotic mess of your soul into a polite, three-second soundbite.

3. The Shift to Agency

What I hate most about the question is its profound passivity. It treats “it”—your life, your situation, your fate—as an external force that is simply happening to you, like the rain hitting the diner window.

But as I sat there listening to the low hum of the fluorescent lights, I realized that the “going” is secondary.

What is infinitely more important is what you make of the situation. * The situation is just a pile of raw lumber.

• The situation is a messy, unedited draft of a poem.
• The situation is just raw data.

Your agency is the only thing that actually exists. Whether “it” is going well or poorly is largely a roll of the cosmic dice. But how you steer the ship through the swell, how you arrange the lumber—that is the only part of the story worth telling.

4. The Request for Precision

I looked across the table at my old acquaintance. He was waiting for the canned beverage. I didn’t say “It’s going.”

I wanted to say: “I am currently trying to understand why the red neon reflecting in that puddle looks so impossibly lonely.” Or: “I am wondering if it is possible to miss a version of yourself that never actually existed.”

I want to be asked questions that require a search of the premises.

• “What are you noticing today?”
• “What is the heaviest thing you are carrying right now?”
• “What did you learn during the silence this morning?”

The next time someone asks you how it’s going, try to resist the reflex. Don’t give them the mask. Give them a fragment of the truth, even if it’s a small, jagged one.

Because the moment we stop using the script is the moment we actually wake up.