A Scarcity of Conversations: What Happens to the Human Soul When We Don’t Have Enough People to Talk To?

And what we can do about it

A world without Amazon, Twitter, Google, and the Internet, in general, is unthinkable.

They are beyond useful to most people and while constantly streamlining their activities and shortening the time it takes for us to get shoes, shirts, or paper towels delivered to our door, they are also rapidly and effectively reducing our attention spans, limiting our conversations and inserting greater and greater distance between you and the nearest human.

Every conversation, every moment spent exchanging ideas with someone, enhances our ability to understand them and ourselves.

• Today the average American spends about 5 1/2 hours on their smartphones every day.
• They spend approx 3 hours per day watching television
• And per a recent survey, about 37% of adults in America have not written a personal letter in the last 5 years.

Since the advent of the smartphone and the rise of social media and our resulting dependence on it, people are spending less and less time actually talking with one another.

The world is constantly changing and reinventing itself. My grandfather delivered blocks of ice for old “ice boxes” used in the 1920s and 30s. Not needed anymore. We evolved and now have refrigerators that tell us what we’re low on via our smartphones.

The Pandemic proved what many of us were already thinking or moving towards. We don’t need people as much as we used to.

Those Boomers among us, out of necessity had to talk to more people than is required today. With individual bakers and grocers and tailors and pharmacists, we spent more time delivering messages, picking up packages for our parents, telling the drycleaners — not too much starch on dad’s shirts, please. Interaction was essential.

More important? We’ll see.

We talked to teachers and priests and traffic cops who walked us across the street. To our neighbor about the Yankees, our friends about the Mets and Knicks. Our dad about the book we were reading, and to ourselves at times about loneliness and whatever issues troubled eight-year-olds.

But today we have distance and a lessening of exposure to what makes people react. People break up with a text. Tell their mother in another city that they’re okay with three emojis and a picture of their cat.

We talk philosophy with each other by sending two photos and a quote. And think long and hard about how many characters we have left in a tweet before sending it on its way.

We end difficult problems by ghosting. Reverting to the quiet anonymity of the internet and leaving people dangling with questions and hurt feelings and believing that we did our best based on a standard that has been lowered over time because we as a society are just too damn busy to engage as our parents or grandparents did.

We let loose those pent-up emotions by trolling and commenting and being mean at a great distance, but do we experience any sense of relief afterward?

Times were fast in the recent past but are a lot faster today.

Today there’s too much work and too little time. Debts growing, studies are endless, and all this information coming at us, like ten rivers dumping into the great Amazon, making it easier to forget what was important to us yesterday as we frantically build ourselves back up today.

With so many words and sentences rushing all around us how is it possible that we’re not talking more, much more than anyone else in history?

And yet studies show that the average person spends up to 8 seconds assessing an article, a story, or a person’s spoken ideas before deciding to click off or walk away.

Scarcity: You can’t see what isn’t there

Scarcity of anything is associated with anxiety. Too little time and our hearts race and blood pressure rise as we cope with too much distance between us and where we HAVE to be.

With too little money we fall into sleepless nights, fights, and accusations; feelings of inadequacy bloom as the harder we work the less impact we seem to be making.

With too little love and contact, we grow isolated and uneasy with who we are and believe that our lot in life was fixed long ago and we’ve just taken years to finally realize that.

But when we talk. When two humans get together and share ideas and feelings and admit that we’re hurting and need a hand, change becomes possible. The endless drudge of working a job we don’t like becomes an opportunity for change with a little direction.

Conversations, words spoken by humans and not AI, are what bring us together. But when we rely on devices and algorithms to determine what we see, what we read, and how we analyze information or ourselves, then we begin to lose the ability to do all those things, and eventually, we won’t be able to.

Social Media is Like a Hammer

The invention of the hammer was a boon to construction and creation. The house, the horseshoe, and the towering cathedral carved in stone became easier and more approachable.

But thanks to mystery novels and cruel impulses this useful tool is now the proverbial blunt instrument that has ended many lives in anger.

Social Media is great. Social Media empowers the delivery of billions of messages every day. It allows ideas and thoughts to travel at the speed of light. Images of life to be conveyed across the globe to relatives in far-off places. To inform and bring them closer.

But it also gets in the way of conversations.

Allows the lack of time to remain a potent excuse for words to be replaced by images and illustrations made by someone else.

Making it okay to text instead of call. To distill our lives into digital moments so that we become less capable of conversing and less comfortable in confronting people.

Takeaway

Talking is simple, like riding a bike. We learned to do it at one. Recited poems at school at six. Went out on our first date at fifteen. We got this. But nothing remains constant forever.

Malcolm Gladwell made the 10,000-hour rule popular in his book, Outliers. Practicing for 10,000 hours brings about mastery of complex skills and materials — like ice skating, shooting three-pointers, or talking.

Pull that old bike out of the garage after 15 years and how does it feel? Awkward and unsteady? You remember sure enough, but not much interested in racing down the hill.

After 20, 40, or 60 years nobody is really worried about forgetting how to talk. When they get to the counter to order a coffee, they’ll find the words.

But talking isn’t always communicating. It isn’t listening or sharing ideas or resolving problems.

How many times have we walked away from someone thinking, I just spent 10 minutes talking and they didn’t hear a word I said.

The more we do something the better we get at it. The less we do, the less important it becomes for whatever reasons.

We won’t forget how to talk, but we might forget the reason we started doing it in the first place.

To be understood.

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” George Bernard Shaw

Dr Mehmet Yildiz George J. Ziogas James Knight Rebecca Romanelli Jenine Bsharah Baines Stuart Englander