RESOLVING THE LEDGER
This is one outlet's own report from Fortune — the article as it was filed. Other outlets are covering the same event; open the full story to compare every source side by side.
See the full story · 1 sources
In 1976, Tom Wolfe published an essay in New York Magazine calling it the “Me” decade. Americans, he argued, had turned away from the collective causes of the 1960s and inward, toward personal fulfillment: therapy, self-help seminars, astrology, the search for a truer self. Christopher Lasch made a similar case a few years later in “The Culture of Narcissism,” describing a retreat from public life into private psychological maintenance.
Fifty years later, that cultural shift has embraced the convenience economy, creating what I’ll go ahead and call “me-maxxing.” 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 researchers combined data from 22 separate studies conducted between 2005 and 2019, covering 2,197 participants ages 10 to 94, mostly in the U.S. but also in Mexico, Australia, and Europe. Each participant wore a device that passively recorded snippets of their day, which researchers later used to estimate how many words they spoke. Pfeifer said she and Mehl noticed the discrepancy almost by accident, while working on an unrelated replication study.
“That loss of words really adds up to a staggering number,” she told Fortune .
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. But Pfeifer stopped short of pinning the trend on technology itself. She said it was the convenience economy that drove this change: ordering food through an app instead of sitting down at a restaurant, having groceries delivered instead of walking the aisles, or checking out at a kiosk instead of a register.
“Younger adults are more likely to use an app to order food as opposed to going somewhere and actually eating it there,” she said. “But beyond that, there are also larger changes in how what we consider polite, how society congregates, what we consider as acceptable behavior around others.”
What is ‘wasted’ time?
Pfeifer described self-checkout and food-ordering apps as tools built around a single goal: removing the need to talk to another person.
“Using the self checkout is more efficient because you don’t have to wait in line as much,” she said. “You don’t have to waste time talking with the cashier. Instead, you just scan your stuff and leave.”
That tracks with what Jessica Finlay, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Colorado—Boulder, has found in her own research on what sociologists call third places. Fortune previously reported on Finlay’s work showing that even routine errands, like a trip to the grocery store, have stopped functioning as a place to run into people. She described a shift away from lingering and toward getting in and out: People no longer browse the aisles or make small talk with a neighbor or the person behind the counter, the way a grocery run used to double as a chance to mingle. Finlay calls this kind of everyday contact “the science of small encounters,” tied to what she describes as a person’s “relational portfolio,” the broader set of people someone interacts with day to day, separate from close friends or family.
Pfeifer said time spent waiting is often labeled “wasted,” as though it produces nothing, when in practice it can offer a break from the pressure to be constantly productive.
“Are we really making it more efficient?” she said. “And is that really something that’s desirable to us? I think is a question that we should certainly be causing more now.”
She connected the pattern to the “time is money” metaphor, which she said “has really done a lot of heavy lifting in the last few years,” a habit of asking how time can be maximized, or what return it can produce, rather than simply how it is spent. Even hobbies, she said, increasingly come bundled with an expectation of external proof, like a gallery show, a competition, commercialization, or a personal record, rather than being done for their own sake.
Pfeifer’s study ended in 2019, before the pandemic reshaped how people work and socialize. She suspects the trend has worsened due to the pandemic, when remote work and social distancing dismantled some of the last regular occasions for casual, in-person talk. And even after restrictions lifted, many people had to relearn basic social habits: “It wasn’t really clear, like, what are the new social rules.”
The loneliness epidemic
Pfeifer said this fits into the ongoing phenomenon of the loneliness epidemic, but she still doesn&#...
AIPROPX is an independent multi-source news index — we track, compare, and connect coverage from across the web into one place you won't find anywhere else.