Feeling Socially Rusty? Try a Little Light Gossiping.

As we re-enter civilization, it’s OK — maybe even necessary — to dish about people who aren’t present. If done in the right way.

Go ahead, talk a little trash. Gossip may not be good for you, per se, but it’s deeply connected to human nature. And it might just help in navigating a post-pandemic world — at least in a social sense. The historian Yuval Noah Harari wrote in “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” that gossip helped early Homo sapiens form larger and more stable bands. (This was roughly between 70,000 and 30,000 B.C.E.) He borrowed the idea from the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who theorized in his 1998 book “Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language” that language — and by extension, gossip — replaced grooming, a social bonding practice still seen among our primate cousins.