We’re ‘me-maxxing’ so much, we’re saying 30% fewer words a day than we did 20 years ago

Fifty years later, that cultural shift has embraced the convenience economy, creating what I’ll go ahead and call “me-maxxing.” The convenience economy brought about food and grocery delivery straight to your doors, all without talking to a human. You can go through self-checkout and avoid the long lines, just how you can order your coffee from your app a few blocks away and pick it up as you pass by. Me-maxxing is simply the result of the convenience economy placing a higher value on your personal time. My time is valuable, and unlike the “Me” decade of days old, the current technology has put a premium on extracting the most out of my availability. As a result, the optimization of my time also means I’m skipping those moments of human exchange, all to save a few saved minutes.

A new study suggests those choices add up to something larger: a measurable decline in how much people talk at all to anyone. In a paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, Valeria Pfeifer of the University of Missouri–Kansas City and Matthias Mehl of the University of Arizona found that the average person has spoken about 338 fewer words a day per every year that’s passed since 2005. Over the 14 years covered by their data, that adds up to nearly a 30% (28%) drop in daily spoken words, from an average of 15,959 words a day in 2007 to 12,792 in the most recent estimate.

The researchers combined data from 22 separate studies conducted between 2005 and 2019, covering 2,197 participants ages 10 to 94, mostly in the U.S. but also in Mexico, Australia, and Europe. Each participant wore a device that passively recorded snippets of their day, which researchers later used to estimate how many words they spoke. Pfeifer said she and Mehl noticed the discrepancy almost by accident, while working on an unrelated replication study.

“That loss of words really adds up to a staggering number,” she told Fortune.

The decline was not evenly distributed. Participants under 25 lost 451 words a year, on average, compared with 314 words a year for participants 25 and older, a 44% larger decline for the younger group. But Pfeifer stopped short of pinning the trend on technology itself. She said it was the convenience economy that drove this change: ordering food through an app instead of sitting down at a restaurant, having groceries delivered instead of walking the aisles, or checking out at a kiosk instead of a register.

“Younger adults are more likely to use an app to order food as opposed to going somewhere and actually eating it there,” she said. “But beyond that, there are also larger changes in how what we consider polite, how society congregates, what we consider as acceptable behavior around others.”

What is ‘wasted’ time?

Pfeifer described self-checkout and food-ordering apps as tools built around a single goal: removing the need to talk to another person.

“Using the self checkout is more efficient because you don’t have to wait in line as much,” she said. “You don’t have to waste time talking with the cashier. Instead, you just scan your stuff and leave.”

That tracks with what Jessica Finlay, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Colorado—Boulder, has found in her own research on what sociologists call third places. Fortune previously reported on Finlay’s work showing that even routine errands, like a trip to the grocery store, have stopped functioning as a place to run into people. She described a shift away from lingering and toward getting in and out: People no longer browse the aisles or make small talk with a neighbor or the person behind the counter, the way a grocery run used to double as a chance to mingle. Finlay calls this kind of everyday contact “the science of small encounters,” tied to what she describes as a person’s “relational portfolio,” the broader set of people someone interacts with day to day, separate from close friends or family.

Pfeifer said time spent waiting is often labeled “wasted,” as though it produces nothing, when in practice it can offer a break from the pressure to be constantly productive.

“Are we really making it more efficient?” she said. “And is that really something that’s desirable to us? I think is a question that we should certainly be causing more now.”

She connected the pattern to the “time is money” metaphor, which she said “has really done a lot of heavy lifting in the last few years,” a habit of asking how time can be maximized, or what return it can produce, rather than simply how it is spent. Even hobbies, she said, increasingly come bundled with an expectation of external proof, like a gallery show, a competition, commercialization, or a personal record, rather than being done for their own sake.

Pfeifer’s study ended in 2019, before the pandemic reshaped how people work and socialize. She suspects the trend has worsened due to the pandemic, when remote work and social distancing dismantled some of the last regular occasions for casual, in-person talk. And even after restrictions lifted, many people had to relearn basic social habits: “It wasn’t really clear, like, what are the new social rules.”

The loneliness epidemic

Pfeifer said this fits into the ongoing phenomenon of the loneliness epidemic, but she still doesn’t know how our conversations and social interactions fits in.

“Of course, we don’t know if it’s cause or effect,” she said. “But I do definitely think that there is a contribution of this to the loneliness epidemic.”

“We know that having more conversations is tied to more positive emotions and to higher psychological well-being,” she continued. “We likely have fewer conversations because we have fewer opportunities to have social interactions, or some of those social interactions may not be as long or as intense as they used to be, and therefore we may not feel as connected with others.”

The loneliness epidemic costs the U.S. economy an estimated $406 billion a year in lost productivity and health care spending, and researchers have found that chronic isolation carries a mortality risk on par with smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

The lost words also aren’t concentrated in one missing conversation a day, Pfeifer said, but scattered across dozens of small exchanges that used to happen without anyone noticing. She compared it to how a fitness tracker counts steps.

“It’s not, you know, spending an hour every day working out that’s going to make a difference, but it’s all these small habits that you have throughout the day,” she said. “I do agree with how you’re describing our lives being so scheduled and so organized that there seems to be very little room for us to have an additional thing. But again, I think small habits are potentially a space where we can gain back some of those lost words.”

Texting is also not a catch-all.

“Research says it’s not the same,” she said.

Typed conversations, she said, tend to produce weaker social bonds than face-to-face ones, even when they cover similar ground, in part because they’re asynchronous: a text sent in the morning can sit unanswered for hours, which removes the pressure to engage in the moment but also opens room for a person to avoid a conversation altogether rather than have it. Face-to-face conversation, by contrast, demands attention right away and doesn’t allow the same kind of quiet opting out.

In the end, Pfeifer said, giving someone a longer answer to “how was your day” could help push this isolation.