Silent retreats are all the rage; hotel guests are embracing ‘hushpitatility’. But won’t this leave us more isolated?
Are we becoming too quiet? As a joyless, intolerant shrew, my kneejerk answer is a predictable “if only” (writing this on a train full of happy holidaymakers isn’t helping). But am I wrong? I find myself confronted with evidence that people are taking the expression “say less” literally. A study recently reported in the Atlantic found that daily spoken word counts declined by around 300 every year between 2005 and 2019. A sample group of 2,197 participants, aged between 10 and 94, wore devices that randomly recorded them as they went about their lives; each year, they spoke on average 338 fewer words than the year before. For under-25s, the decline was even steeper: 451 fewer words.
Even I can see that’s worrying. Spending time with other people is good for our brains, health and mood, while, as the US surgeon general put it so starkly in 2023, “lacking social connection can increase the risk for premature death as much as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day”.
