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Some years ago, I had a friend who got into trouble on the internet. He was writing a book that took a strong stance on a controversial topic and had been talking about it on social media. He didn’t have a large following, but activists who opposed his view of the issue began to notice and decided that he needed punishing for wrongthink.

Their angry invective about his work spread the conversation to people who anonymously and deliberately seek to offend and provoke others online—and these trolls began to abuse my friend relentlessly. “People are telling me to kill myself!” he told me, with desperation in his voice. He started worrying about being doxxed, or worse. “Do I need private security? Maybe I should move.”

Out of curiosity, I asked my friend how much time he was then spending on social media, monitoring all the abuse. “Pretty much all day,” he said. This made sense to him because he felt the gravity of the situation demanded his full attention: A threat’s a threat, right? I made one simple suggestion: Delete the apps and stop interacting with social media for a week. He took my advice reluctantly, but over the next few days, he stopped thinking about the predicament so much. By the time he reopened the apps, he found that the trolls had largely moved on to new victims and targets.

What my friend learned was that this harassment, which had seemed very real to him, could be erased almost completely by using two powerful weapons: perception and attention. What works in our internet-based culture can apply equally well to other areas of modern life. These two tools can help you eradicate problems that once seemed insoluble.

[Read: The rise of the troll]

What is, for you, the reality behind these lines you’re reading? Is it the ones and zeros that compose the computer code that makes these words visible on a screen? Or is what’s real the words themselves as linguistic signs with meaning? Or does the underlying reality reside in the concepts and ideas that the words evoke in your brain? For the philosopher Edmund Husserl, father of phenomenology, the latter is the truth. What you experience may differ from some objective reality, but this is not relevant. The reality that matters, Husserl argued, is what you perceive.

The next question, then, is where does that perception come from? According to the cognitive psychologist Donald D. Hoffman and his colleagues, “Our perceptual systems, like our limbs and livers, have been shaped by natural selection.” That is, you perceive what evolution has determined best aids your safety, survival, and gene propagation.

For example, you might find a mushroom in the forest that is, objectively speaking, a fungus named Amanita phalloides. But to you—if you perceive it appropriately—the death cap is a source of deadly poison to be avoided at all costs. In this, and many things, relying on your perception as your reality is a very good thing.

And yet, perception can also lead you astray. What you perceive might be based in error—a historical case in point being the belief common until the 19th century that tomatoes were poisonous. So you would have been perceiving them as dangerous, whereas they are, in fact, nutritious and delicious. Alternatively, you can be deceived or manipulated by malefactors—people who want you to fear something or someone to control your behavior, such as voting a particular way or following certain media. The trolling that messed with my friend’s head was akin to this.

Finally, perception can be distorted by glitches in your brain. A case of this is the “rubber-hand illusion.” In a famous 1998 experiment, subjects watched a rubber hand being stroked by a paintbrush, while their own hand—which was behind a screen—was simultaneously stroked. They knew this was the case, but after 10 minutes, more than half of the subjects could not help perceiving the rubber hand as authentically part of their own body. As one participant put it, “I found myself looking at the dummy hand thinking it was actually my own.” Recent research by neuroscientists shows that this effect occurs because, in response to these contradictory stimuli, the brain regulates the primary motor cortex in a way that lowers the sense of connection with the actual body part and incorporates the alien body part.

This brings us back to the perception created by social media, which is prone to all the distortions of objective reality listed above: They lead you to misperceive phantom threats as real ones, because even a single, remote person acting sociopathically can create the illusion of a troll army. Your brain naturally treats a threatening or abusive person on X the way it would treat the presence of a hostile intruder in your house. I don’t discount the chance in extreme cases that a cyber threat can turn into a real one, but the research about cyberbullying describes the harms as much more commonly psychological, not physical, in nature.

[Read: The false equation of atheism and intellectual sophistication]

The main weapon that online bullies and trolls possess is your brain—specifically, your brain’s tendency to create reality around the perception of a threat, because cyberabuse is the kind of menace that the limbic system was evolved to perceive: When that system is triggered by hostile action from a stranger, your brain instinctively thinks that your physical safety is at risk.

Your first line of defense, then, is perception itself. Imagine I told you that you had the power to turn a scary, violent attacker on the street into a pathetic, broken little person staring all day long at his computer screen. That’s basically what you can do with a better grasp of how trolling works. Studies published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences in 2014 found that bullies on the internet tend to possess psychopathic traits such as sadism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy—the “Dark Triad” (or “Tetrad”) I’ve written about previously. Additional research has shown that they themselves are disproportionately cyberbullied; moreover, young-adult Dark Triads are also far more likely to be anxious, depressed, and suicidal than their population average. In real life, these bullying trolls are people you might pity more than fear.

Just as you have some control over your perception, you also have control over your attention. If your perception of a social-media troll matched their actual psychological profile, your natural response to being trolled might change from engagement to avoidance tinged with compassion. If an obnoxious Dark Triad type tried to confront you in public—unlikely though that is, given their typical preference for hiding behind internet anonymity—you would almost certainly just cross the street to avoid any interaction. You can apply the same logic in the virtual world by recalling the internet adage “Don’t feed the trolls.” The point of trolling is to get a reaction, so refusing to engage starves the beast. My own way of practicing this is simply to ignore anyone who is anonymous online. Effectively, they don’t exist.

If you do get sucked into a more serious internet conflagration—as my friend did—you might try a more systematic denial of attention and withdraw from your habitual platforms entirely for a time. I recommend a complete social-media cleanse of at least a week or two every year, regardless of whether you’ve encountered any digital predators. If you use that cleanse to delete the app, you rid yourself of the bothersome bullies as well.

None of these private strategies eliminates the value of more collective interventions, of course. Internet psychopathy is a social nuisance that lowers life quality for most people in one way or another. The approaches I suggest here are the equivalent of soundproofing your house against nuisance neighbors. Taking your own defensive measures doesn’t preclude the passing of laws to protect the whole neighborhood from antisocial behavior. Social-media companies should find better ways to eliminate pathological behavior as well as protect free speech.

[Read: The drunk-text decade]

My friend made the internet trolls disappear from his life by resisting the default responses of his own brain: He deliberately changed his perception and withdrew his attention. Because this worked like a charm, it got him thinking: Were there other areas of his life where this strategy could work? After getting informed about alcohol use, he changed his perception of drinking and avoided engaging with the substance. He also decided to reevaluate what had been his favorite news organization; he then saw it in a much more skeptical light, so he withdrew his attention by unsubscribing. He has used the same technique to tackle various relationships and behaviors that he realized were toxic and holding him back. He says he feels free.

The threats from trolls and cyberbullies are one thing, but not all threats should be ignored. If you feel a strange lump in your armpit, say, trying to perceive it differently or refusing to give it your attention is foolish and dangerous. A potential health emergency is unlikely to be something you can avoid, but in much of what happens in life, you probably have more control than you think. The strategic use of perception and attention can set you free too.

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In Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century Divine Comedy, the narrator—in effect, Dante himself—is led through hell, purgatory, and finally to heaven on a journey that illuminates the meaning of life, death, love, and hate. Many religious readers believe that Dante was divinely inspired, a sort of prophet, and that the secrets of heaven and hell in his poem are more truth than fiction.

Dante’s vision was certainly that of a devout Christian. But his inspiration also came from a more earthly source: a woman named Beatrice Portinari, whom he met first when they were both 9 years old, and again some years later. They never had a romantic relationship—each married someone else—and she died at the age of 24. But throughout the years, Dante carried a flame for Portinari that he had for no other woman. Even after her death, she lived on in Dante’s writing, entering as a character in the Paradiso section of Divine Comedy who helped guide him up to heaven.

You may or may not share Dante’s religious convictions, but perhaps you can relate to the notion that romantic love at its best feels like a mystical, even spiritual, experience, and is disappointing and flat when it does not. Understanding why this is so can help you ignite (or reignite) the metaphysical passion you crave.

[Read: Valentine’s Day: Just another liberal stimulus?]

Romantic love is the ultimate complex problem in that the concept of being in love is fairly easy to understand—I love you, you love me, and we both know how that feels—but achieving that state is an impossible problem to solve in any scientific way. The greatest minds in history have had their hearts broken, have made idiotic decisions while enamored, and had relationships fail without really understanding why.

Scientists have nevertheless developed an understanding of the neurochemical process when we fall in love: Initial feelings of attraction implicate sex hormones; increased norepinephrine and dopamine create a sense of anticipation and euphoria; scholars hypothesize that a drop in serotonin may lead to ruminative thinking about the beloved; and the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin foster a pair bond that can, ideally, last a lifetime. When in love, especially in early stages, you feel addicted to the other person—and, in fact, activity resembling drug addiction is exhibited in the pleasure and pain regions of your brain.

Awareness of these scientific phenomena can be very helpful to avoid costly mistakes in life. As I tell my business-school students, extramarital affairs frequently start among professionals at work because simply the close contact involved in collaboration with colleagues can initiate the neurochemical cascade described above. But that knowledge will get you only so far. However perfect your grasp of the science, managing your romantic life in any predictable way is impossible. Even neuroscientists, fully cognizant of their own brain chemistry, will feel as though they’re in heaven when they fall in love and in hell when they break up. Like the rest of us, they might get involved too fast or with the wrong person, end up regretfully tracking an ex, or find themselves struggling to forget a former amour.

Especially in its early phases, deep romantic love does in fact feel spiritual. According to a 2011 Marist poll, 74 percent of American men and 71 percent of women answered affirmatively the question “Do you believe in the idea of soul mates, that is two people who are destined to be together?” This shared feeling of transcendent connection, of oneness, is no coincidence: Both romantic love and mystical experiences are characterized by intense positive, even ecstatic, emotion, as well as unusual activity in the temporolimbic regions of the brain.

The world’s great religions themselves treat romantic love as a supernatural phenomenon. In Hinduism, the Bhagavata Purana elegizes the earthly loves of Lord Krishna as a symbol of divine adoration. In the Bible, Adam sees Eve and says, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.” Indeed, deeply religious couples typically see their marriage as a sort of antenna designed to pick up signals from heaven, the means by which God transmits love to one through the other. According to this theological understanding, to deny your spouse love is to deny them God’s love. Not shockingly, in one study of female nurses, regular religious service attendance is associated with 50 percent lower divorce rates than that population’s average. Romantic love is, for them, divine love.

Whether you are religious or not, to be in love and to be loved tends to evoke a special understanding of the cosmic why of life. People in love feel as if they were made for love; even if precisely what that entails is hard to articulate, they apprehend it as something absolute and sublime. “If you aren’t the love of my life,” they feel, “that means something is wrong with my life, not with our love.”

[Read: What Taylor Swift understands about love]

This may all make sense and accord with your personal experience—or it may not. And if not, you could be wondering why. The answer might well be that you have fallen into one of two modern traps: trying to solve the problem of romantic love or trying to simulate it.

Romantic attraction can’t be reduced to an algorithm: Whether two people will fall in love, and stay in love, cannot be accurately predicted. Yet that is what technology has tried to do, for example, in the form of internet dating, which, for a time, seemed to have permanently supplanted all other ways to meet a romantic partner. Dating sites first emerged in the 1990s, and by 2020, more than 50 percent of heterosexual couples had formed after meeting this way. Sometimes, this led to good results, and people were happily and permanently partnered. Troublingly, though, scholars recently found that, on average, couples who ultimately get married to someone they met online have less stable and satisfying marriages than people who meet offline. Current data also suggest that people are deserting dating apps in favor of other ways of making romantic connections—partly because of dissatisfaction with the potential partners that the algorithm offers them.

Much more problematic than trying to solve for love is trying to simulate it; for example, with pornography, the consumption of which has risen in the past two decades. One recent study found that 81 percent of Australian men ages 15 to 29 consume pornography at least weekly, as well as 28 percent of Australian women in the same age range. Pornography use is strongly correlated with incidence of depressive symptoms and loneliness for certain groups because, I’d suggest, it reduces a complex, spiritual, relational experience into one that is superficial, biological, solitary.

These obstacles to modern romance do, however, imply their own solution. First, add real-life humans back into the process, no matter how daunting or inconvenient that initially seems. This starts with how we go about meeting potential partners. Just as attraction and passion require two fully committed participants, many people believe that old-fashioned matchmaking is best done by humans who know you. Research suggests that you may actually have a poor sense of what you want in a partner, the result being that your misconceptions lead you to curate your online dating profile in a way that attracts the wrong type; people who know you and love you are much less likely to make this mistake.

Second, eschew in love what is dry and ugly. To express the cosmic parts of life, we frequently turn to art, which allows us to reach beyond ordinary vocabulary and engage the soul. Beauty stimulates our brains in ways that help us find meaning. This is not the airy claim of a mere aesthete: In scientific experiments that measure neurological activity, researchers have found that when subjects contemplate aesthetically pleasing works of art, they display a distinctive neural pattern of high connectivity among different brain regions that is characteristic of performing complex cognitive and creative tasks.

No surprise, then, that the people who, throughout history, have best expressed the depth and beauty of love are painters, composers, and poets such as Dante. Consider how this human art of romance compares with the cyborgian lifelessness of a dating algorithm or the depressing unloveliness of pornography.

[From the February 2010 issue: Dante Alighieri: Epic poet, ass kicker]

Finally, take inspiration from Dante and try mingling romantic love with the divine. If you are religiously inclined, you might seek the love of your life among the community at a house of worship or meditation center. Besides increasing your chances of finding someone who shares your beliefs and values, such environments provide an ideal ecosystem that primes your temporolimbic brains for the ecstasy of love, of both the divine and romantic variety.

Whether you are young lovers or lifelong partners, a spiritual journey together might be just what you both seek. For years, my wife and I have celebrated our wedding anniversary with a religious pilgrimage, each in different parts of the world. At these times, I can deeply relate to Dante’s equal passion for Beatrice and for God.

While the everlasting pleasure, that did full
On Beatrice shine, with second view
From her fair countenance my gladden’d soul
Contented; vanquishing me with a beam
Of her soft smile, she spake: “Turn thee, and list.
These eyes are not thy only Paradise.”

Donald Trump is waging war on the civil service in the name of efficiency. But Washington created the modern civil service to make the government efficient in the first place, ending a patronage system wracked with graft and incompetence. Trump’s so-called reforms will only make it harder for the White House and the Republican Congress to enact their own policy aims, and harder for any president to get things done in the future.

Trump sees the “deep state” as an impediment to policy change, not as an instrument of it; he attacks the idea of a nonpartisan civil service and the civil service itself. Government workers are “crooked people,” Trump said while campaigning last year. “They’re dishonest people. They’re going to be held accountable.” To that end, his White House has offered to buy out federal employees under his “Fork in the Road” policy, fired more than a dozen inspectors general, transferred hundreds of workers outside their area of expertise, spurred experienced career employees to quit, put thousands of workers on furlough or leave, and attempted to strip job protections from nonpartisan employees. A message sent to millions of civil servants late last month emphasized the importance of loyalty and trust; a message sent this week argued that fewer positions should be held by the “impartial.”

In many ways, Trump is seeking to return the country to the spoils system that existed in the 19th century. Pioneered by President Andrew Jackson, that system awarded tens of thousands of civil-service jobs to allies and co-partisans of the White House. (The phrase “to the victor belong the spoils” does not originate in ancient Athens or Rome. It was first uttered by New York Senator William L. Marcy in the early 1830s.) This kind of patronage was efficient, Jackson and his supporters argued: “Rotation in office” meant that the civil service aligned with the ideology of the president, and brought fresh workers into the stodgy government.

But having party loyalists manage the Postal Service and firing thousands of people every time the White House changed hands was not a model of efficiency. Postmasters, clerks, and surveyors paid a share of their salary as kickbacks to the party in control of their position. “Solicitation letters were sent by the party to each worker, return envelopes were provided to ensure that payments were made, and compliance was carefully monitored,” the economists Ronald Johnson and Gary Libecap note. Scandals abounded. The collector of the Port of New York embezzled $1 million, not adjusted for inflation, before fleeing for England in 1838.

[Read: Make government efficient again]

In 1880, President James Garfield ran on reform, promising in his inaugural address to pass civil-service regulations “for the good of the service” and “for the protection of incumbents against intrigue and wrong.” Shortly after, he was assassinated by a deranged preacher and onetime resident of the Oneida free-love commune who’d been seeking a diplomatic appointment in Paris. At that point, Congress decided things needed to change. Garfield’s successor, Chester Arthur, “only got his job as vice president because he was a product of the spoils system,” Jon Rogowski, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, told me. Arthur had held the post of collector of the Port of New York too, and had gotten rich on the job. “He was this incredible messenger, saying, We should reform, even though it would dramatically upend the very system that I came through myself,” Rogowski said.

The Pendleton Act of 1883 finally ended the spoils system, requiring government employees to pass an exam and forbidding hiring on the basis of race, politics, religion, or national origin. It led to a 25 percent reduction in staff turnover and increased the qualifications held by bureaucrats. Postal-delivery errors dropped by 22 percent, and the volume of mail delivered by carriers increased as much as 14 percent.

During the Progressive Era and the New Deal—and after the Watergate scandal—Congress passed further regulations, making it easier for federal agencies to promote high-performing employees, protecting whistleblowers, ensuring that the executive branch did not overstep its authority, and eliminating racial bias and nepotism in hiring. Today, a thicket of laws prevents the White House from making partisan hiring decisions, and civil servants from engaging in partisan activity. The Government Accountability Office and inspectors general root out incompetence, inefficiency, and waste.

[Read: Trump’s campaign to dismantle the government]

Every bureaucracy has some bloat. But there are no more civil servants now than there were in the late 1960s, even as the population they serve has grown by two-thirds. The tasks these 2.2 million employees perform are often uncontroversial; the Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the largest employers, and 70 percent of the civil service works in defense and security-related agencies. Moreover, federal workers are more efficient than private workers; they are less expensive to hire too.

Nor is the system biased against conservative administrations. Government employees are not particularly ideological. They tend to have long careers, working with presidents from both parties. On the job, civil servants tend to be better than politicians at shaping policy. The country does not need White House staffers to make decisions “setting interest rates or deciding which banks to bail out, to determine schedules for Air Force aircraft maintenance, or to certify particular drugs as safe and effective,” the political scientist Francis Fukuyama argues. When they do, he says, “the results are almost always harmful.”

Other countries show the risks. Viktor Orbán’s attack on Hungary’s civil service has led to the degradation of the country’s water, sanitation, and electric systems, and corruption in the construction industry and real-estate market. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro’s purging of public officials made the government less efficient.

In the United States, the strong, nonpartisan civil service reduces costs for taxpayers, with meritocracy and impartiality bolstering the country’s economic growth, one sweeping review found. The system also protects the public from graft and lawlessness. “There is a group of actors that are sworn to uphold the Constitution,” Donald Moynihan, a scholar of public administration at the University of Michigan, told me. “If someone in the government is trying to do an illegal thing, there will be a general counsel who says no, and there will be a bunch of civil servants who raise red flags, and there will be an inspector general who will catch it.”

Civil servants and inspectors general are raising red flags right now, filing lawsuits and notifying members of Congress as scarcely adult Trump officials commandeer government systems, access private data, illicitly shut down payments, and put whole agencies through the “wood chipper,” in the Trump adviser Elon Musk’s phrasing, contravening the country’s laws. But, as Moynihan pointed out, Trump is attempting to “defang” these systems of internal control.

[Read: Trump advisers stopped Musk from hiring a noncitizen at DOGE]

As a result, Americans can expect greater incompetence, higher costs, increased turnover, less expertise, falling trust in government, and lower morale. They can also anticipate higher sovereign-debt costs: Investors charge eroding democracies with incompetent bureaucracies more to borrow. The fallout will not end when the Trump administration ends. Future presidents will have to rely on less experienced civil servants to enact their policies.

The country’s civil service could use reform—to empower it. Right now, Washington’s bureaucrats are mired in bureaucracy, tasked with meeting strict and onerous procedural requirements rather than achieving the government’s policy goals. Hiring rules make it hard for Washington to poach experienced workers from private industry; procurement rules make outsourcing over-common and expensive. But Trump is seeking to cow the civil service and politicize it, not reform it. Rather than seeing the country’s 2 million public employees as agents, he sees them as enemies. This is not going to make the government more efficient. It is not going to make America great.

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As a rule, I avoid social and professional dinners. Not because I’m anti-social or don’t like food; quite the opposite. It’s because the conversations are usually lengthy, superficial, and tedious. Recently, however, my wife and I attended a dinner with several other long-married couples that turned out to be the most fascinating get-together we’ve experienced in a long time. The hostess, whom we had met only once before, opened the evening with a few niceties, but then almost immediately posed this question to the couples present: “Have you ever had a major crisis in your marriage?”

Quite the icebreaker, right? Faced with that, you might think you’d be making your excuses and beating a hasty retreat. But first, keep in mind the social milieu: This dinner took place in Madrid, not Minneapolis. More to the point, the hostess introduced the topic with a rare degree of grace and skill: She did so in a way that communicated genuine curiosity about other people’s experience, and with warmth, humor, and love. Her question drew fascinating, candid, thoughtful responses—so, far from itching to leave, I found that the hours flew by (no small feat, given that many dinners in Madrid go past midnight).

The occasion left me thinking that most of us could learn a thing or two about how to participate in a conversation—even a delicate or difficult one—so that the exchange inspires joy and interest. Luckily, plenty of research exists that can show how to do just that.

[Read: Have the conversation before it’s too late]

Some people have an easier time with conversation than others. Extroverts in particular find social intercourse invigorating, whereas introverts typically experience it as taxing. Neuroscientists have offered an interesting explanation for this. For a 2011 paper in the journal Cognitive Neuroscience, researchers used electroencephalography to measure a form of brain activity, known as the P300 wave, when subjects were presented with human faces. They found that extroverts had higher P300 amplitudes than introverts, meaning that social stimuli grabbed their attention (an obvious precondition for, say, engaging energetically in conversation). The introverts showed less brain activity associated with attraction to, or interest in, the faces of potential interlocutors—so individuals of this type, we can reasonably assume, would be less primed for lively conversation.

Another group for whom conversations can be difficult is people on the autism spectrum, even if their autism is mild and they are very high-functioning. Experts in this field offer three explanations for this: a resistance to changing topics, a failure to ask follow-up questions, and a tendency to fixate on a particular topic to the exclusion of others.

One common problem with conversations is that we don’t understand one another as well as we think we do. Writing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2011, five scholars showed that even among friends and spouses, people believe they understand the intended meaning of what others say 85 percent of the time, whereas the true figure for the reliability of their comprehension is 44 percent. As the researchers note, a query as innocent as “What have you been up to?” could convey genuine interest, annoyance at the other person’s lateness, or suspicion about what they’ve been doing. This instability of meaning might be because of tonal ambiguity or because people actually don’t listen to one another well enough. In one recent experiment in which subjects were assigned the task of getting to know someone, a conversational partner was in fact not listening to the other person for 24 percent of the interaction.

[Listen: Best of How To: Make small talk]

Arguably, the foremost reason that conversations are difficult is because we don’t prepare for them or work to get better at them. This is the argument of my Harvard colleague Alison Wood Brooks (no relation), whose new book, Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, follows decades of research on how we interact with people, and how to do it better and more enjoyably. As Brooks shows, people generally spend more time thinking about what they will wear to a dinner party than what they will talk about. Researchers have found that, laziness aside, this insouciance about conversation is because 50 percent believe that thinking about topics in advance will make a conversation feel forced and artificial; only 12 percent of people think such mental preparation will enhance the experience.

Brooks helpfully lays out four research-backed principles for conducting a strong and enjoyable conversation, for which she provides a mnemonic device called, appropriately enough, TALK.

T is for topics.
Before you go into a conversation, think of a few subjects that you’d like to discuss with your partners. This no doubt was on the mind of our hostess in Madrid. She was well aware that her guests shared her values and beliefs about marriage, and almost certainly weighed the risks beforehand of launching a delicate topic. Her icebreaker was not spontaneous but premeditated, which—far from making the gambit awkward—raised the level of trust around the table.

This tactic is appropriate for settings other than dinner parties. I typically write down significant questions that I want to ask my wife. Try to keep a running list of topics that would be good when talking with various significant people in your life. You might use a prepared question as a good reason for a call or visit.

A is for asking.
Obviously, a stiff interrogation does not make for a great conversation. My young-adult students commonly complain that this mode of questioning is the only way their parents communicate with them, which suggests that some parents get stuck in a pattern dating from when their children were little and have not developed a relationship with them as mature adults. That is a particular generational and perhaps intra-familial problem. But as a rule, a conversation without questions is unrewarding—it’s no fun to talk with someone who seems totally incurious.

The difference is that good questioning requires deep listening. When you’re genuinely focused on what the other person is saying, follow-up questions come naturally. In contrast, when listening means nothing more than waiting to talk—so often the case in my world of academia—follow-up questions are either nonexistent or pro forma.

L is for levity.
Brooks is a big proponent of humor, because it makes conversations fun. This doesn’t mean that you need to join an improv-comedy troupe. In fact, successful humor rarely means telling jokes; it means maintaining a “good humor”: a lightness and a gentle wit, which keep things from being too heavy and serious. We might think of laughter more as a social lubricant than a response to a punch line. Indeed, in one study, researchers found that only 10 to 15 percent of laughter in a conversation was responding to something actually humorous.

An easy way to maintain this type of good humor is simply by smiling—as much for your own benefit as your conversational partners’. Psychologists have long known that when we smile, it can raise our own mood. Moreover, good humor transmitted with a smile has been shown to be contagious in interactions; a person will tend to take the emotional cue of a sympathetic smiling face and feel happier themselves. As you get ready for your next dinner party, try smiling in the mirror while putting on your tie or makeup.

K is for kindness.
This is probably the most important ingredient in a good conversation. You might think of it as generosity, because it involves thinking about what the other person in a conversation needs and then giving it. As Brooks notes, this might be encouragement, hard feedback, new ideas, a quick laugh, a sounding board, challenging questions, or just a break. But it always means focusing primarily on the other person, rather than on yourself.

Perhaps that sounds exhausting or unenjoyable. Quite the contrary. As many studies have found, using your resources for others tends to promote greater happiness than using them on yourself. This doesn’t have to be limited to material resources, of course—in fact, your attention may be the most valuable thing you can share at any given moment.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The benefit of doing things you’re bad at]

One last thing to keep in mind about having better conversations: At our Madrid dinner party, the main ingredient of the sparkling exchange was its depth. The reason I shy away from dinners in general is their shallowness, their focus on topics of no true significance, the kind of encounter that simply passes the time innocuously, with no real investment or risk. I don’t care about your new golf clubs. Life is short; go deep or go home, I say.

Am I a weirdo, to hold this attitude? The science says not. A 2010 study in the journal Psychological Science found that the higher the percentage of conversation that is small talk, the lower the participants’ well-being, whereas the higher the percentage of substantive topics, the higher the well-being.

So go ahead: Invite us over and ask about our marriage. Mrs. Brooks and I will happily stay past midnight.