The following is excerpted from an online article posted by Fortune
The convenience economy brought about food and grocery delivery straight to your doors, all without talking to a human. You can go through self-checkout and avoid the long lines, just how you can order your coffee from your app a few blocks away and pick it up as you pass by. Me-maxxing is simply the result of the convenience economy placing a higher value on your personal time. My time is valuable, and unlike the “Me” decade of days old, the current technology has put a premium on extracting the most out of my availability. As a result, the optimization of my time also means I’m skipping those moments of human exchange, all to save a few saved minutes.
A new study suggests those choices add up to something larger: a measurable decline in how much people talk at all to anyone. In a paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, Valeria Pfeifer of the University of Missouri–Kansas City and Matthias Mehl of the University of Arizona found that the average person has spoken about 338 fewer words a day per every year that’s passed since 2005. Over the 14 years covered by their data, that adds up to nearly a 30% (28%) drop in daily spoken words, from an average of 15,959 words a day in 2007 to 12,792 in the most recent estimate.
The decline was not evenly distributed. Participants under 25 lost 451 words a year, on average, compared with 314 words a year for participants 25 and older, a 44% larger decline for the younger group.
The lost words also aren’t concentrated in one missing conversation a day, Pfeifer said, but scattered across dozens of small exchanges that used to happen without anyone noticing. She compared it to how a fitness tracker counts steps.
“It’s not, you know, spending an hour every day working out that’s going to make a difference, but it’s all these small habits that you have throughout the day,” she said. “I do agree with how you’re describing our lives being so scheduled and so organized that there seems to be very little room for us to have an additional thing. But again, I think small habits are potentially a space where we can gain back some of those lost words.”
Texting is also not a catch-all.
“Research says it’s not the same,” she said.
Typed conversations, she said, tend to produce weaker social bonds than face-to-face ones, even when they cover similar ground, in part because they’re asynchronous: a text sent in the morning can sit unanswered for hours, which removes the pressure to engage in the moment but also opens room for a person to avoid a conversation altogether rather than have it. Face-to-face conversation, by contrast, demands attention right away and doesn’t allow the same kind of quiet opting out.
In the end, Pfeifer said, giving someone a longer answer to “how was your day” could help push this isolation.