Inc. Magazine
We may be more connected than ever, but we’re speaking less, about 28% fewer words a day than we did in 2005.
New Science Proves We’re Saying 120,000 Fewer Words a Year. That’s Like an Entire Novel
Author: Bill Murphy Jr.
One thing to know about me is that I talk to everyone, all the time.
Last summer, my family stayed at a motel on Cape Cod for a few days. On the first morning, we desperately wanted coffee. I remembered there was a pot going all the time in the front office, so I volunteered to go.
That was around 8:00 a.m.
At 9:30, my wife came looking for me—and found me deep in conversation with the woman behind the counter. We’d been talking about how she came to work at a motel, where she was from, other jobs she’d had, how Cape Cod had changed, her relationship with her kids.…
I got caught up, as always happens. In fact, I have a business called Life Story Magic, where the entire point is that I interview people’s parents and grandparents on video to capture their life stories, because I love having conversations.
It turns out that I am apparently an even bigger outlier than I realized, and that the gap between me and everyone else is only getting wider.
Researchers at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Arizona analyzed audio recordings from 2,197 people between the ages of 10 and 94 across 22 studies conducted between 2005 and 2019, and found something that surprised even them.
Each year during that period, people spoke an average of 338 fewer words per day than the year before.
Over the full span, daily spoken words dropped about 28 percent, from roughly 16,600 to about 11,900.
Published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, the data was originally buried in a larger paper on gender differences in talkativeness. The researchers themselves almost missed it.
Multiply 338 fewer words per day times 365 days. That works out to 123,370 fewer spoken words per year.
That’s roughly the word count of To Kill a Mockingbird, Wuthering Heights, or the first Twilight novel.
Each year, the conversations we’re no longer having would fill a novel.
My Inc. colleague Jessica Stillman wrote about this study a few weeks ago, and the Wall Street Journal covered it as well.
I want to add a few thoughts of my own, because, as I told the researchers in an email, this study spoke to me.
The researchers can identify the trend but can’t fully explain it.
Technology is an obvious suspect, since the decline coincides with the rise of texting, social media, and smartphones.
But the fact that older adults are losing words suggests something broader is going on.
My own theories:
- More people are working from home, which eliminates the ambient conversation of offices and commutes.
- Fewer people are going out for lunch, alone or with others.
- Delivery apps remove the need to speak to anyone to get food.
- Add to all that the AirPod effect—the way headphones have made it socially acceptable, or even expected, to be unreachable in public spaces where strangers used to talk.
Do all of those factors combine to explain a 28-percent drop? Does it really matter, anyway?
As I wrote a few years ago in a piece about the crossing guard near my daughter’s school, casual conversation with near-strangers—what social scientists call “weak ties”—turn out to matter more for our happiness than most of us realize.
Research links daily conversation quantity directly to well-being.
“When we speak less, we connect less,” those researchers put it. “With every lost word we wear away our connections with others.”
In retrospect, that’s so on-the-nose. Lead researcher Valeria Pfeifer offered a fix at the time: “If each of us just talked to one more person each day, we could reverse this trend.”
You don’t have to get a stranger’s whole life story; leave that to me.
But a few words here and there might make a difference.
A final note, which made me laugh: The Wall Street Journal ended their coverage of this story with the line: “Do you think you’re talking less than you used to? Join the conversation below.”
Good advice, for more reasons than one.
Credits: TCA, LLC.