Not critical to your point, but I can't stand this habitual exchange:

But there's a lot of small habits in everything we do, that we don't really notice. Necessary habits. When someone asks you how you are, the habitual answer is 'Fine, thank you,' or something similar. It's what people expect. The entire greeting ritual is habitualness, to the point that if you disrupt the greeting, it throws people off.

When people ask how I am, I want to give them information. I want to tell them, "Actually I've had a bad headache all day; and I'm underemployed right now and really lonely." Or sometimes I'm feeling good, and I want to say "I feel great!" and have them actually know that I feel great and not think that I'm just carrying through the formula.

Human speech is one of the most valuable resources in the universe, and he were are wasting it on things that convey no information.