I'm Not Talking Enough!

    For those of you of a certain age, remember our elementary school report cards that came in those orange office-like envelopes, much of it hand-written and were given to us to take home to our parents so they could praise us for how great we were doing; or ground us because we got a big fat ‘F’ or ‘U’ (unsatisfactory) in a particular class? All apologies if I have mentioned this before, but when I was a youngster, I went to SIX elementary schools, kids, from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts to New Jersey. We moved around a lot. And believe it or not, I got the big, fat, capital ‘U’ every single report card next to a handwritten phrase, “Peter has trouble waiting his turn to speak in class, and then never shuts the hell up,” or something like that. Hey, is it my fault my classmates were dopes? You’re an idiot. Then and now. 

    Now, with that in mind, consider the consequence, or seeming lack thereof, of 300 words. That’s roughly 3 or 4 of my elementary school diatribes per week! Theoretically speaking though, it’s not too much. A casual conversation as you stand in a coworker’s doorway, perhaps, asking about the trip they just went on; or the small talk you exchange with the other people in your foursome, as you wait on the first tee; or a young, charming, precocious student telling his 5th grade classmates, “Put your hands down…I got this.” Take those 300 words out of your daily routine, and not much would seemingly change, right? But what if you spoke that many words fewer every day, for a year? And what if you then found yourself speaking even less the year after that…on and on for more than a decade? All of that missing speech begins to add up.

    This is precisely what is suggested by a fascinating and rather unsettling study recently published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, by authors Valeria Pfeiffer, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Matthias R. Mehl, Ph.D., professor at the University of Arizona. By gathering data from 22 studies conducted across the course of 14 years, from 2005-2019, including participants ranging in age from 10 to 94, they were able to chart the steady decline of spoken conversation across the dawning of the digital age of the 2000s. The findings come from “analysis of audio data collected from more than 2,000 participants whose daily lives were sampled through short recordings of their natural environments,” to assess the use of speech on a daily basis.

    What the authors found is rather jarring, although many have theorized that human communication and the spoken word have probably declined in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems that this decline has been happening far longer, and at quite a steady pace. The researchers estimate that on any given day, people in the study were speaking roughly 338 fewer words than they did on that day the prior year. On its own, that works out to 120,000 fewer words spoken in a year, which is still perhaps not a recognizable amount all on its own. But that rate of decline held relatively steady throughout the 14 years of data collected from 2005 to 2019, meaning that people were losing roughly 120,000 additional spoken words each and every year. In terms of daily figures, where a prior study using the same method estimated people spoke roughly 16,000 words per day in 2005, by 2019 that number was down to merely 12,800 words per day–which is to say, a 20% decline in how much we speak, from the middle of the 2000s to the end of the 2010s. And again, that’s not even including the sheltering and seeming social stagnation of the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. You have to wonder, just how low is the figure now?

    In case it needs to be said, humans speaking that much less is a significant finding, one that speaks both to the way our “conversations” have migrated to the digital space, potentially stripping them of nuance and significance, and indicative of the way we’re spending less time in the presence of (and connecting with) other people. As Pfeifer, who fittingly has a background in linguistics and psychology, put it: “Speaking less means spending less time connecting with others. Research has consistently linked loneliness with negative outcomes for both mental and physical health. At the same time, everyday conversation is associated with greater well-being. If people are having fewer conversations, they may be losing both the immediate emotional benefits of social interaction and the long-term benefits of maintaining strong relationships.” 

    And as you might suspect, the biggest losses in speech came from younger demographics of people, those who are also most likely to be living an increasingly isolated, lonely digital existence. Although people of all age groups declined, Pfeifer noted that, “When we divided the sample into participants younger than 25 and those older than 25, we found that younger participants lost more spoken words per year.”

    This all dovetails with findings connected to what sociologists have referred to as the “friendship recession” observed in the post-COVID era, although as with the results of the above study on spoken conversations, the time we spent with friends was already in notable decline in the 2010s as well. Regardless, the bottom line numbers leap out: The percentage of U.S. adults who report having zero “close friends” has quadrupled to roughly 12% in the years since 1990, while at the same time the number of those who report they had 10 or more close friends has fallen threefold. There are clearly myriad reasons for this: People are spending more time working, and those struggling along in the gig economy often feel they have no time for outside relationships. Parents spend more time focused on their children than ever, and less time maintaining outside relationships and friendships. The simple amount of time we spend at home has skyrocketed, particularly among younger people, who now report spending more than two additional hours per day at home than they did 20 years ago. Take a wild guess as to how many of those additional hours are spent in front of screens.

    As I have told dear friends, time and time again…I hate texting. I want to hear your voice and converse with you! Call me! I want to hear nuance, frustration, love, context, etc. Everything that makes communication and deep conversation worthwhile. I write a lot, but I need to talk more! Oh, please no! The loss of spoken words, in fact, could have profound but difficult-to-chart effects down the line for human behavior and our psychological and physical well-being. Active, complex speaking is associated with improved memory, retention and mental clarity and vitality, seemingly helping to stave off conditions like dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. And just texting your elderly parents will not help cure that. Speaking less is associated with the opposite. If the trend is ever to be reversed, humanity may need to rediscover an interest in social connection that is rapidly dwindling. So start yapping!

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com