Perhaps the most visceral indicator of our modern loneliness crisis is the way that loud, bustling spaces are becoming eerily silent. If you’ve noticed the absence of chatter in coffee shops and subway cars, you’re observing a bigger social trend…
— Rogé Karma, staff writer with The Atlantic.
I honestly haven’t noticed the absence of chatter in subway cars.
Probably because I’ve never been in a subway car.
But I have been in coffee shops, here in my little home town, and people still seem willing to talk to one another. Quietly. No need to be loud and bustling in a coffee shop, in my opinion. Of course, if you’re sitting alone — as I usually am — you wouldn’t want to be talking too loud, anyway. That would be weird.
Apparently, my hometown is not typical of the cities were Mr. Karma, staff writer for The Atlantic, spends his time, and where bigger social trends can be observed.
Such as: people talking less the they used to.
In a paper published last March in Sage Journals, researchers Valeria Pfeifer and Matthias Mehl looked into some published data about recorded conversations, and determined — using typical researcher-type calculations — that Americans are not talking as much as they used to.
Previous reports had suggested that, in 2007, an average person spoke about 16,000 words a day. By 2025, the number was down to around 12,500.
Doing a new analysis of the recordings, the two researchers determined that the average person spoke about 120,000 fewer words with each passing year, between 2005 to 2019. The reduction in the estimated number of words spoken per day was about 28%.
I don’t know what kind of people these researchers were studying. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken 12,500 words in a single day, let alone 16,000.
Maybe on a rare occasion? Like, when Darlene and I were in a heated argument? Or when I was explaining the dangers of sex to my son? Like I said, on a rare occasion.
Has my rate of ‘words per day’ rate decreased since 2007? Well, of course it has. My son is grown, and living in Austin, Texas. We talk on the phone maybe once a month, and never about sex.
And Darlene and I are divorced.
A lot of other people have also gotten divorced since 2007. And a lot of kids have left home. So we would expect the average number of words spoken per day to be less, right?
But researchers get their panties in a wad about this stuff. And then they publish research that get picked up by writers at The Atlantic, and people get anxious.
Nevertheless, there may be something to be anxious about, if people really have stopped talking to one another.
From journalist Olga Kazan, also writing in The Atlantic, this month:
In Europe in the 1700s, coffeehouses were sources of coffee, but also conversation. As the MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle points out in her 2016 book, Reclaiming Conversation, many people went to coffeehouses specifically to have rich, deep, sometimes even confrontational discussions: She quotes the British essayist and politician Joseph Addison, who wrote in 1714, “I have taken a particular Care never to be of the same Opinion with the Man I conversed with.”
Contrast this with how, some 300 years later, I engage with my local coffeehouse, Starbucks. I open the app at home and order a latte, then whirl my Honda through the drive-through and collect my drink from an employee, who says, “Have a nice day.” No conversation — just caffeine.
I could take issue with that “just caffeine” comment. There’s really no comparison between between starting the morning with a nice cup of coffee, and starting the morning with you wife reminding you that the car needs an oil change and this is the third time she’s had to remind you.
Along the same lines as Joseph Addison, the 1716 essayist, I have taken care never to be of the same opinion with the woman I converse with.
But if you look into the problem using the world’s Number One Source of Interesting But Sometimes Unreliable Information — Google.com — you find that Americans have stopped talking about one a particular subject that used to generate a big percentage of those 16,000 daily words.
Politics.
We now fear bringing up political topics in conversations because… well, I don’t think that needs any explanation.
The whole problem ultimately derives from the fact that humans are naked. But wear clothes.
Among our primate relatives — gorillas, apes, monkeys, etc — social connections within the tribe are maintained and strengthened partly through the activity known as “grooming”. Picking the lice and nits and other annoying pests off your family members and close friends. Primates spend a generous part of the day grooming one another.
Not being covered with hair and instead covering our bodies with fabric, humans had to develop a different method for maintaining a close connection with tribal members. So we learned how to talk, and especially, how to gossip. This constant and daily exchange of (generally useless) verbal noise serves, in humans, much the same purpose as grooming does in other primates.
Over time, this practice of constant verbal exchange among humans led to the creation of coffeehouses and to contrarians like Joseph Addison, who purposely take the opposite view in any conversation, just for sport.
I did a little bit of calculating, based on the Pfeifer & Mehl research mentioned above. If Americans are now speaking about 12,500 words per day, and they’ve been reducing the number of daily words by 300 annually, then by the year 2067 we will have absolutely nothing to say.
Let’s not allow that to happen!
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.