I was watching a video from two years ago about different social norms and this showed up. Found someone questioning the same eight years ago on reddit (when it seemed less normalized). It feels so weird not being aware of this shift, even as a foreigner.
Depending on context I tend to respond with:
I quite like
Almost every time I say it, it means “Actually nothing but worries, but it’s socially unacceptable to talk about our declining mental health and I have shit I need to get back to in order to distract myself from this hell that was created to squeeze maximum productivity out of me with minimum investment in life support, so I’m going to end this exchange by pretending everything’s okay.”
Yeah like they all mean something and mmhmm is just the Yep variant nothing else