You know what happened yesterday

They say talk to your friends.

Disclaimer : This is not about every friend ever, but most of them, but again, not all of them 

Or is it?

No its not!

So, when you talk to a friend, could be anyone, classmate, colleague, siblings, anyone else from family and they ask you how are you, what exactly do you do? My reflex is to take a pause, gather my scattered thoughts and tell the person how actually am I. My question is, is there any rule around the time you should take to answer this question? I feel I take too much time, because by the time I collect, process, frame sentence and connect back to reality to speak, topic has changed and the conversation has taken some other shape. 

So why is that no one wants to wait after they have asked that opening question. Is there a protocol that it should be answered in a certain way only, because I like to be honest with my peers sometimes. But that is too old fashioned I guess, or it was never a thing. So in case, this whole thing that I am talking about, if it is getting too vague, let me rephrase it, in points :

1. People ask "how have you been", "how are you"
2. They just expect you to say one word, "good", "nice", "eh", etc
3. No one has the patience to wait for the next word
4. If you say something beyond that one word, people just start conversation with whatever they have in mind, like "you know what happened yesterday"
5. If you are the one who asked this question about someone's wellbeing, and if you are waiting beyond one word, then the conversation gets awkward and there is dead air

Are we really in that much hurry, running out of time, or is it just that people avoid conversation that have a possibility of getting uncomfortable. So much for being social animals.