Six billion dollars. That is roughly what the global telecommunications industry invested in 5G infrastructure in a single quarter of 2023. Satellites. Fiber optic cables threaded under oceans. Towers bristling from every rooftop in every city on earth. The entire project of modern connectivity is arguably the most ambitious engineering undertaking in human history, surpassing the railroads, surpassing the interstate highway system, surpassing arguably even the moon landing in sheer coordinated effort. And what did we do with it. We used it to send each other six words. Hey. Hey. Wyd. Nm. Same. Lol. I am not even mad. I am genuinely impressed by the efficiency of it. We built a system capable of transmitting the entire Library of Congress in four seconds and we settled on a communication style that would embarrass a telegraph operator from 1844. Samuel Morse sent the first telegraph message and it was a quote from the Bible. We have the bandwidth to stream consciousness itself and we chose monosyllables.

The Golden Age of Saying Absolutely Nothing

The Cigna 2024 Loneliness Index found that 58 percent of American adults feel like nobody knows them well. Fifty-eight percent. In an era where you can literally video call someone on the other side of the planet while both of you are on a toilet. We have more ways to talk than any generation in the history of talking, and we are lonelier than the generation that had to walk three miles to borrow a cup of sugar from the one neighbor they could stand. There is something almost poetic about that if you squint hard enough and ignore the part where it is actually just bleak. The problem is not the technology. The technology is a miracle. The problem is that we confused access with intimacy. We thought that being reachable meant being reached. Holt-Lunstad's 2015 meta-analysis across 3.4 million participants found that weak social connection carries a mortality risk comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Fifteen cigarettes. Your group chat where nobody has said anything meaningful since 2019 is basically a pack of Marlboros in app form. I checked my own text history last week because I am a journalist and also a masochist. In the past thirty days I exchanged messages with forty-one people. The average substantive exchange, meaning anything beyond logistics or reaction emojis, was with three of them. Three. I have a phone full of conversations that are essentially two people taking turns confirming that they are both still alive. Alive and doing nothing. Alive and watching the same show. Alive and experiencing the same weather.

The Emoji Did Not Kill Conversation but It Did Not Help

Here is what I think happened. We got so many channels that we spread ourselves across all of them and went shallow in each one. You cannot be deep on seven platforms simultaneously. So you pick a depth of about two inches and you maintain it everywhere. You heart the Instagram post. You haha the Facebook comment. You thumbs-up the Slack message. You send the birthday text that says happy birthday with an exclamation point and you feel like you did something. You did not do something. You performed the appearance of doing something, which is a different activity entirely, the way waving at someone from across a parking lot is different from actually walking over and asking how they are. The Surgeon General's 2023 advisory on loneliness called it an epidemic. An epidemic. We gave it the same word we use for diseases that require coordinated international medical response. And the prescription is not more bandwidth. It is not faster download speeds or better video compression or another app that promises to connect you with people who share your interests. The prescription is the thing we have been avoiding, which is the willingness to be boring and specific and vulnerable with another human being, to say something that takes more than two seconds to type, to ask a question you do not already know the answer to, to risk the terrible possibility that the other person might actually tell you how they are. We built the tower. We ran the cable. We launched the satellite. And then we opened the most powerful communication device ever conceived by the human mind and typed nm u.