How Are You?

The correct answer to the above question is.  ‘I have absolutely no idea.’  No more you have without a point of reference, which unfortunately you will never get.  The yardstick is how other people feel.  What is the norm?  I bet in our normal, i.e. not sick condition, we all feel different. Doctors are in vain. I agree they can pretty reliably tell us whether there is some ailment, disease, broken leg or whatever the symptoms tell them, but they never can know about that bit of the brain which tells us how we actually feel.  Without being recently injured or suffering from some transient bug, we generally accept our normal state, be it low or high on the scale of well-being as OK to us.  To the question ‘How are you?’ we answer, 'fine',     But is your ‘fine’ the same as Tom, Dick, or Sally's 'fine'?   It's very unlikely, because you have no idea how they feel.  Tom might always feel perfectly alright, better than you, but suspects that others feel more well than he, so he may reply, guardedly, ‘Not too bad.’ Dick might have had a splitting headache since he was born but since he knows no different and expects everybody to have a splitting headache, he says ‘fine.’  Sally, a practising hypochondriac may always be bravely bad, in the ‘don’t ask’ category.

Anyway, 'How are you?' doesn’t necessarily mean, ‘How are you?’  It is used commonly just as a greeting. It's used with, or instead of 'Hello' and 'Good Morning'.  In this case the enquirer is not necessarily concerned about your health, it is part of the convention of the conversation in meeting. The topic of weather often follows this opening. It's all very understandable, as very often people have little or nothing to actually impart to each other.  These opening gambits give time to think of further talking points.   You can't pass an acquaintance in the street, and with an airy wave of the hand, announce 'nothing to say', and walk on.

If asked 'How are you?' and we think our greeter really wants to know we don't ask them to wait while we assess our organs as best we can without the aid of the blood pressure arm-squeezer.  We are generally ready with the answer at all times.  It's on our internal instrument panel between the 'tired' and 'hungry' dials, so we say at once 'not so dusty', or 'in the pink', or 'fit to drop'. Because of its common usage we have developed lots of these semi-humorous answers. Some people use the same one all the time, all their lives, like the non-committal ‘so-so.’ You can either commiserate or congratulate such a person. 

As we have said, the enquiry, 'How are you?' doesn't have to be answered to the purpose. To reply, 'How are you', is sufficient, and neither party is obliged to give a diagnosis.

So,  ‘How are you?’ does not mean we actually want to know how they are.  It may well be a matter of supreme indifference to us how they are, indeed we may perhaps wish them worse than they are, to perdition perhaps, and if we are given a negative reply a grave countenance may be difficult to do.

Fortunately, when we feel as we usually feel, we are 'fine'. If we have a longstanding ailment, when it starts we announce,  ‘Not too good’, but once we are used to an indisposition we may announce we are 'fine' again.  For example if are asked ‘How are you?’ and we happened to have a wooden leg, we would not reply, ‘I’ve still got the wooden leg.’  We would say ‘Fine.’ Even if this victim had the dreadful luck to lose his other leg at a later date, after the recovery he or she would still be ‘Fine.’ not, ‘Miss the last of my legs.  Fine with the first one.’

Let us look at the hangdog sufferer whom we know from experience, is never ‘Fine.’ He or she can be approached, if it can’t be avoided, with a pre-emptive initial greeting like.  ‘Oh Dear.’  ‘Same old trouble?’  ‘No good asking how you are?’  Such people do like talking about themselves in preference to talking about you, and no topic is more dear than how they suffer excessively in comparison with everybody else.  So I recommend splitting your brain and let one lobe think about a holiday on a tropical idyll, while they are going through Grays Anatomy in your other lobe.  You must fix a funereal countenance, tut and shake the head while symptoms are recounted and embroidered.  Do not enter into a counter-illness debate or you will be both dead on the pavement before you’ve finished. 

Oh, sorry reader, I forgot to ask.  ‘How are you?’  Good.  Me? Oh, I’m a Stoic of the old school. My last words, accompanied by a feeble thumbs-up sign, will be, ‘Never felt better.’  I hope.