by Higgenbotham » Sun May 03, 2026 1:05 am
People are talking less than they used to. A lot less.
Between 2005 and 2019, the number of words the average person uttered in a day fell by 28%. That’s according to a recent study from a team of U.S.-based researchers.
“We estimated the difference at about 330 fewer words spoken per day for each year during that time period,” says Matthias Mehl, a professor of social psychology at the University of Arizona. That adds up to roughly 120,000 fewer words spoken during the course of a year, and millions of fewer words spoken during the 15-year study period. “It’s a substantial loss,” he says.
While the number of spoken words declined among all age groups, the drop was steeper among those under 25.
Put all these factors together, and you end up with societies where many forms of spoken human-to-human interaction become increasingly rare. That’s a problem, Mehl says.
When we replace verbal communication with text, we miss out on a lot of the nuance communicated by tone of voice, body language, and other verbal and non-verbal cues. “Text always has a lot of ambiguity,” he says. “We use emojis to reduce that uncertainty, but it’s clear that the facial expressions, the gestures, the prosodic elements of spoken communication—humans are designed to perceive all this as a gestalt, and these elements lend themselves to feelings of belonging and understanding.”
While a decline in idle chitchat among strangers in settings like grocery stores or restaurants may not seem as significant, research shows that, surprisingly, such small talk does a lot for our well-being.
“When we have these little interactions, it puts us in a good mood and helps us feel more connected,” says Gillian Sandstrom, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Sussex in the U.K.
Sandstrom is the author of a new book, Once Upon a Stranger, which explores the surprising benefits of small talk among unfamiliar people. She says that, historically, researchers in her field have tended to study the importance of close ties and “inner-circle” relationships among good friends and family members. But her work has focused on “outer-circle” interactions among acquaintances, neighbors, and even strangers. Far from being expendable, these impromptu and often fleeting conversations with people we don’t know contributes to our sense of belonging.
“When we have these interactions, they tend to go much better than we thought they would, and we come away from them with a sense that people are generally good,” she says. These seemingly trivial interactions strengthen our sense of community and faith in humanity, she adds.
It’s also true that the more we converse with other people—perhaps especially those with whom we’re not close—the more we feel at ease in other people’s company. “Social skills are a skill like any other,” she says. “If you don’t keep practicing the thing, you lose competency.”
https://time.com/article/2026/04/28/peo ... s-per-day/
Widdowson talked about 3 forces that bring about a new dark age - disintegration, discohesion, and disorganization - loss of political, social, and economic integration, cohesion, and organization.
In The Phoenix Principle and the Coming Dark Age, he states:
Chapter 34 - The discohesion process
Less sociability
The futurologist John Naisbitt suggests that
teleworking, i.e. working from home via computer
links, is unlikely to be taken up on a large scale. He
says that people will continue going to the office
because they like being with other people.2840 In
coming to this viewpoint, he seems to be thinking
primarily of high achievers with interesting jobs.
Most ordinary workers are only too glad to give up
office politics and the stresses of rush hour travel.
Teleworking may not take off, but it will mainly be
for the practical reason of access to equipment, and
because employers wish to monitor what their
workers are doing.
The societies of the descent will be
characterised by growing loneliness and isolation.
Naisbitt is correct that humans are sociable
creatures and that they will always desire to mingle
and interact. Therefore, discohesion will not imply
the disappearance of social relationships as such.
Instead, it will involve the disappearance of
networks of interlocking relationships. There will
be a continuing breakdown of communities, the
milieux that shape behaviour.
In cohesive societies, people’s work is a
significant and permanent aspect of their lives. In
Japan, for instance, employees have traditionally
had an almost family-like orientation to the
company and supervisors have tended to look after
their staff even in matters not necessarily connected
with work.2841 This kind of employment culture is
able to locate people within a broader community
and can inculcate standardised values, attitudes and
beliefs. By contrast, in the future, individual careers
will be highly volatile and egocentric. People will
move easily from job to job, pursuing their own
interests. Those that can do so certainly will work
from home. More people will choose to go
freelance, using internet brokering services to put
them in touch with work opportunities. Notions of
loyalty between a company and its employees will
become wholly outmoded.
The growth of the team-building and
motivational industry, which lays on corporate
events ranging from casino evenings to abseiling
from cliffs, reflects companies’ rearguard effort to
retrieve their lost cohesion. These artificial
initiatives, however, cannot compare with the
cohesive effects of working for the same company
for decades, living side by side with one’s
colleagues in the same small town, sending one’s
children to the same local school, and meeting
regularly for leisure activities. Yet western
societies moved away from such a situation long
ago, and even in Japan that era is fast disappearing.
Young people, raised on internet culture and
computer games, are increasingly used to spending
large amounts of time alone, and unused to
suppressing their desires for the overall benefit of a
co-operative group. They will take readily to a
highly individualised employment culture centred
on electronic media. Some commentators have
even predicted that the whole notion of a
permanent job may disappear. People will
assemble for particular tasks and then disperse
again.
The changing nature of employment will be
just part of a wider syndrome of declining
sociability during the descent. It will become
increasingly common, for example, for people to
pursue friendships and romance by e-mail.
Traditional contexts such as school, university and
work are increasingly fraught as occasions for the
formation of relationships, given the possibility of
being accused of harassment. The dating agency
and the on-line chat room will be much more
attractive as venues in which people may meet.
While such electronic encounters certainly
constitute social relationships, they are established
outside any broader social context. The lovers who
meet on the internet may come from different sides
of the planet. In general, they will have no mutual
associates, nor any previous shared experience. An
encounter between such perfect strangers is
rootless and therefore all the more likely to be
transient. The partners have no one to please or to
disappoint but themselves. This is an essentially
selfish approach to sociality, devoid of obligations
to a community of relatives and friends. It means
that people’s social lives will be fragmented and
individualistic, and society itself will become a
porous tracery of bonds, easily broken apart.
Rampant de-legitimisation
Discohesion means de-legitimisation. It means
that fewer people will uphold familiar values, and
more people will be ready to denounce these values
as oppressive and unpleasant. Everything that
serves to propagate a shared culture will have its
faults systematically exposed and criticised. For
example, the de-legitimised royal family may be
excluded from public life and eventually removed
from Buckingham Palace. Other traditional
institutions will be attacked as incorrigibly racist
and sexist.
Anything that suggests advocacy for
characteristically British values and conduct will be
excised from the school curriculum. It will be
thought deplorable to suggest that western
civilisation has anything positive to offer or
deserves to be emulated by natives, let alone by
recent immigrants and their children. The lessons
of the future will be quite unfamiliar to anyone
educated in the twentieth century. Children will not
study French or German, say, but will be given a
generalised course in the languages of the world,
and they will be taught the importance of
preserving traditional tongues in the face of
western cultural imperialism.
The Phoenix Principle and the Coming Dark Age by Marc Widdowson, 2001
p. 301
[quote]People are talking less than they used to. A lot less.
Between 2005 and 2019, the number of words the average person uttered in a day fell by 28%. That’s according to a recent study from a team of U.S.-based researchers.
“We estimated the difference at about 330 fewer words spoken per day for each year during that time period,” says Matthias Mehl, a professor of social psychology at the University of Arizona. That adds up to roughly 120,000 fewer words spoken during the course of a year, and millions of fewer words spoken during the 15-year study period. “It’s a substantial loss,” he says.[/quote]
[quote]While the number of spoken words declined among all age groups, the drop was steeper among those under 25.[/quote]
[quote]Put all these factors together, and you end up with societies where many forms of spoken human-to-human interaction become increasingly rare. That’s a problem, Mehl says.
When we replace verbal communication with text, we miss out on a lot of the nuance communicated by tone of voice, body language, and other verbal and non-verbal cues. “Text always has a lot of ambiguity,” he says. “We use emojis to reduce that uncertainty, but it’s clear that the facial expressions, the gestures, the prosodic elements of spoken communication—humans are designed to perceive all this as a gestalt, and these elements lend themselves to feelings of belonging and understanding.”
While a decline in idle chitchat among strangers in settings like grocery stores or restaurants may not seem as significant, research shows that, surprisingly, such small talk does a lot for our well-being.
“When we have these little interactions, it puts us in a good mood and helps us feel more connected,” says Gillian Sandstrom, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Sussex in the U.K.
Sandstrom is the author of a new book, Once Upon a Stranger, which explores the surprising benefits of small talk among unfamiliar people. She says that, historically, researchers in her field have tended to study the importance of close ties and “inner-circle” relationships among good friends and family members. But her work has focused on “outer-circle” interactions among acquaintances, neighbors, and even strangers. Far from being expendable, these impromptu and often fleeting conversations with people we don’t know contributes to our sense of belonging.
“When we have these interactions, they tend to go much better than we thought they would, and we come away from them with a sense that people are generally good,” she says. These seemingly trivial interactions strengthen our sense of community and faith in humanity, she adds.
It’s also true that the more we converse with other people—perhaps especially those with whom we’re not close—the more we feel at ease in other people’s company. “Social skills are a skill like any other,” she says. “If you don’t keep practicing the thing, you lose competency.”[/quote]
https://time.com/article/2026/04/28/people-say-fewer-words-per-day/
Widdowson talked about 3 forces that bring about a new dark age - disintegration, discohesion, and disorganization - loss of political, social, and economic integration, cohesion, and organization.
In The Phoenix Principle and the Coming Dark Age, he states:
[quote]Chapter 34 - The discohesion process
Less sociability
The futurologist John Naisbitt suggests that
teleworking, i.e. working from home via computer
links, is unlikely to be taken up on a large scale. He
says that people will continue going to the office
because they like being with other people.2840 In
coming to this viewpoint, he seems to be thinking
primarily of high achievers with interesting jobs.
Most ordinary workers are only too glad to give up
office politics and the stresses of rush hour travel.
Teleworking may not take off, but it will mainly be
for the practical reason of access to equipment, and
because employers wish to monitor what their
workers are doing.
The societies of the descent will be
characterised by growing loneliness and isolation.
Naisbitt is correct that humans are sociable
creatures and that they will always desire to mingle
and interact. Therefore, discohesion will not imply
the disappearance of social relationships as such.
Instead, it will involve the disappearance of
networks of interlocking relationships. There will
be a continuing breakdown of communities, the
milieux that shape behaviour.
In cohesive societies, people’s work is a
significant and permanent aspect of their lives. In
Japan, for instance, employees have traditionally
had an almost family-like orientation to the
company and supervisors have tended to look after
their staff even in matters not necessarily connected
with work.2841 This kind of employment culture is
able to locate people within a broader community
and can inculcate standardised values, attitudes and
beliefs. By contrast, in the future, individual careers
will be highly volatile and egocentric. People will
move easily from job to job, pursuing their own
interests. Those that can do so certainly will work
from home. More people will choose to go
freelance, using internet brokering services to put
them in touch with work opportunities. Notions of
loyalty between a company and its employees will
become wholly outmoded.
The growth of the team-building and
motivational industry, which lays on corporate
events ranging from casino evenings to abseiling
from cliffs, reflects companies’ rearguard effort to
retrieve their lost cohesion. These artificial
initiatives, however, cannot compare with the
cohesive effects of working for the same company
for decades, living side by side with one’s
colleagues in the same small town, sending one’s
children to the same local school, and meeting
regularly for leisure activities. Yet western
societies moved away from such a situation long
ago, and even in Japan that era is fast disappearing.
Young people, raised on internet culture and
computer games, are increasingly used to spending
large amounts of time alone, and unused to
suppressing their desires for the overall benefit of a
co-operative group. They will take readily to a
highly individualised employment culture centred
on electronic media. Some commentators have
even predicted that the whole notion of a
permanent job may disappear. People will
assemble for particular tasks and then disperse
again.
The changing nature of employment will be
just part of a wider syndrome of declining
sociability during the descent. It will become
increasingly common, for example, for people to
pursue friendships and romance by e-mail.
Traditional contexts such as school, university and
work are increasingly fraught as occasions for the
formation of relationships, given the possibility of
being accused of harassment. The dating agency
and the on-line chat room will be much more
attractive as venues in which people may meet.
While such electronic encounters certainly
constitute social relationships, they are established
outside any broader social context. The lovers who
meet on the internet may come from different sides
of the planet. In general, they will have no mutual
associates, nor any previous shared experience. An
encounter between such perfect strangers is
rootless and therefore all the more likely to be
transient. The partners have no one to please or to
disappoint but themselves. This is an essentially
selfish approach to sociality, devoid of obligations
to a community of relatives and friends. It means
that people’s social lives will be fragmented and
individualistic, and society itself will become a
porous tracery of bonds, easily broken apart.
Rampant de-legitimisation
Discohesion means de-legitimisation. It means
that fewer people will uphold familiar values, and
more people will be ready to denounce these values
as oppressive and unpleasant. Everything that
serves to propagate a shared culture will have its
faults systematically exposed and criticised. For
example, the de-legitimised royal family may be
excluded from public life and eventually removed
from Buckingham Palace. Other traditional
institutions will be attacked as incorrigibly racist
and sexist.
Anything that suggests advocacy for
characteristically British values and conduct will be
excised from the school curriculum. It will be
thought deplorable to suggest that western
civilisation has anything positive to offer or
deserves to be emulated by natives, let alone by
recent immigrants and their children. The lessons
of the future will be quite unfamiliar to anyone
educated in the twentieth century. Children will not
study French or German, say, but will be given a
generalised course in the languages of the world,
and they will be taught the importance of
preserving traditional tongues in the face of
western cultural imperialism.[/quote]
The Phoenix Principle and the Coming Dark Age by Marc Widdowson, 2001
p. 301