Friendship is a skill. We're losing it (and connection).

I've started noticing how many days I get through without really talking to anyone.

Not "I was alone all day". I mean days packed with things. I ordered coffee on an app and grabbed it off the counter. Got in a car where the driver already knew where I was going. Sorted out a problem with a customer service chatbot. Ordered dinner without calling. Booked a table without booking a table. By 8pm I'd interacted with maybe a dozen businesses and said almost nothing out loud to any of them.

That's not loneliness exactly. But it's something.

We talk a lot about why making friends as an adult is so hard, and the usual suspects are all valid. Social media. Adult responsibilities. Remote work. That whole "I don't owe anybody anything" energy that's been going around. Every week someone goes viral explaining how impossible it is to make friends in your twenties, and every week someone else goes viral explaining how they've made peace with being alone.

But I think there's something simpler sitting underneath all of it.

We're out of practice with connection

Here's the reframe that changed how I think about this: connection is a skill. Not a personality trait, not a thing you either have or don't. A skill. Which means it works like every other skill, meaning it gets rusty when you stop using it.

And we have really, really stopped using it.

There's an article by Olga Khazan in The Atlantic called Another Symptom of Growing Isolation that put a number on something I'd only been vaguely sensing. We are literally speaking fewer words per day than we used to.

A longitudinal study across the US, Mexico, and Australia found a 28% drop in daily words spoken over just 14 years. In 2005, the average was 16,632 words a day. By 2019 it was 11,900.

That's roughly five thousand words a day that used to leave our mouths and now don't.

And it's not because we got quieter people. It's because we removed the reasons to speak. Every one of those small frictions I listed at the top used to be a tiny conversation. Some of them barely counted. "Can I get a large?" is not a meaningful human exchange. But it was reps.

Khazan makes a point I keep thinking about: it isn't always our choice. The places where those exchanges happened are disappearing. The front desk. The waiting room. The cashier. Convenience didn't just make things easier, it quietly removed the places where strangers used to become familiar.

I love the convenience. I'm not giving up my coffee app. But it's worth naming what it costs.

The good news

Skills come back. That's the whole thing about skills. If we lost this through disuse, we get it back through use, and the reps are genuinely tiny.

Pick the slightly worse option. When you have the extra ninety seconds, take the cashier instead of self-checkout. Go inside for the coffee instead of grabbing it off the shelf. Call the restaurant. You're not being inefficient, you're training.

Push through the awkward. Talking to strangers feels embarrassing now in a way I don't think it used to. That feeling is real and also not that informative. Ask the server how their shift is going. Say something about the weather to the person next to you in line. It will feel stupid. It's supposed to feel stupid at first. That's what being out of shape feels like.

Call your friends. Not a text, not a meme, not a voice note. An actual call. Even fifteen minutes hearing how someone's week went does more than a month of sending each other reels.

Make plans that require your body. Use Centr. Pick a date. Put it in the calendar. Show up. It is so easy to let a good intention live in a group chat forever. The muscle only grows in the room.

None of this is complicated. That's kind of the point. We didn't lose this skill in some dramatic way, and we won't get it back in one either. We lost it five thousand words at a time, and that's exactly how we get it back.