Congratulations, We Killed Conversation
Congratulations, America. We finally built the future and it hates the sound of our voices.
Some pale laboratory monks with clipboards and government grants have emerged from the data caves to announce that the average American used to speak 16,632 words a day in 2005, but by 2019 had whittled the number down to 11,900. A 28 percent collapse in verbal output. Nearly one-third of the national mouth economy vaporized.
This is what victory looks like.
For centuries we were burdened by conversation. Neighbors. Clerks. Relatives. Bartenders with opinions. Children asking why the moon follows the car. Then Silicon Valley arrived in fleece vests and dead eyes, promising liberation. Tap here. Swipe there. Press a heart icon instead of forming a sentence. Now we glide through public life like heavily medicated ghosts.
Need food? Summon it silently.
Need groceries? Scan your own beans like a prison trustee.
Need romance? Exchange six messages, two gifs, and disappear forever.
The spoken word has been reduced to customer service emergencies and podcasts no one finishes.
Walk through any city. Observe the species in its natural habitat. Heads bent at forty-five degrees. Thumbs flickering like lizards in heat. Earbuds jammed deep into the skull to prevent accidental human contact. Entire train cars full of people avoiding one another with the grim discipline of Cold War spies.
And still they call this connectivity.
The scholars say mothers using phones speak fewer words to babies. Of course they do. Why waste time teaching language to an infant when the infant has not yet learned to like and subscribe? Soon toddlers will skip nouns entirely and communicate through brand partnerships.
Experts suggest parents narrate daily tasks to children.
“I am placing the avocado in the cart.”
“I am comparing oat milks.”
“I am dying inside.”
This is where we are.
Conversation, they tell us, is cognitively demanding. You must listen, think, respond, regulate facial expressions, and avoid screaming, all in fractions of a second. A brutal athletic event for the modern nervous system. No wonder people prefer sending a flame emoji and going dark for three weeks.
Some professor urges calm and says more research is needed before mourning the death of language. Fine. Let the academics measure the corpse while the rest of us step over it.
Then comes the proposed cure, delivered with the optimism of a man who has never ridden public transit: if each of us spoke to one more person every day, we could reverse the trend.
One more person.
A single additional human interaction every 24 hours. This is the mountain before us.
Somewhere in the distance, civilization coughs.
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This here is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
When I go on my daily walks, one of the perks is talking with neighbors I routinely see. We talk. We look each other in the eyes. This is interpersonal communication. What today's generation calls "talking" is staring and inputting into a small hand held computer. If it were all left up to me, We would go back to rotary phones, 3 major TV networks, no internet, everything closed on Sundays, 45's, LP's, cassette tapes, Walkmans. We would buy the newspaper everyday and we would have each other to talk to without a machine to distract us. Thank you, Bret.
I agree wholeheartedly, but: when I saw the signs about killing conversation and a phone screen with the silenced audio symbol, my first reaction was the reminder before a set begins at my favorite jazz venue (Green Mill, Chicago) to be quiet.
There’s something magical about being in an audience absorbing non-verbal expression. Unless, of course, someone is singing.