Years ago in Dubai, my friend Mariam told me her country had just appointed its first Minister of Happiness.
“A Minister of Happiness?” I said, with more incredulity than was strictly kind.
Mariam gave me a look. Ours is a friendship that can hold some weight, so she told me directly not to be obnoxious about it, with a smirk that was half serious and entirely on my side.
My incredulity had a logic, or what passed for one. A cabinet post for a feeling struck me as indulgent, the kind of over-the-top gesture Dubai specializes in, a city that gilds everything it touches. Americans, I assumed, were not that type. We would never treat happiness as a thing to be managed.
The joke was on me. A decade later the United States has no Minister of Happiness, but only because we skipped the ministry and went straight for the management. We built the happiness labs at Yale and Harvard. We made a course on happiness, the most popular course in Yale’s history. We downloaded happiness apps by the millions. Piece-by-piece, we assembled an entire private happiness industry, all of it aimed at engineering a single feeling, even as the research keeps finding that the harder we chase happiness the more it backs away.
So Mariam was right to wave off my smugness. The country I found indulgent was at least honest about the project, naming it out loud and giving it a title. Mine pretended to be above all that while managing happiness harder than anyone, one app and one syllabus at a time.
It’s not only happiness we get wrong. Somewhere in those same years, quietly, we started talking to one another less.
A new study by two psychologists, Valeria Pfeifer and Matthias Mehl, set out to count how many words people speak in a day and found something they were not looking for. Their data came from more than two thousand people, ages ten to ninety-four, most of them American, recorded across twenty-two studies between 2005 and 2019. Each year, those people spoke about 338 fewer words a day than the year before, a steady downward slide across the whole period. The daily average fell from around 16,000 in the mid-2000s to 12,700 by 2019. More than a quarter of our talking, gone, with no announcement when it left.
It is the shape of the loss that gets me. These weren’t only the long talks with the people we love. They were the small ones, too. The question to the cashier. The hello in the elevator. The stranger you used to stop for directions, before the little blue dot on a phone’s map took over the asking.
David Byrne, of all people, called it years ago. In an essay titled “Eliminating the Human,” the Talking Heads frontman argued that one convenience at a time, technology was removing the people from our days. We used to talk to a teller; now we talk to a screen.
It all arrived under the banner of ease. And some of the friction it carried off happened to be the contact.
The friction has a new solvent now. Laurie Santos, the Yale psychologist behind that oversubscribed happiness course, says the quiet part out loud: the chatbots are always there, and they never judge you. Children are having their first romantic relationships with them.
Every frictionless exchange can make the next human one, with its bad timing and its capacity to wound, a little harder to begin. In one experiment, strangers waited in a room, some with phones and some without, and the ones with phones smiled at each other thirty percent less. We have not just stopped talking as much. We have stopped looking up.
We have decided friction is the enemy of a good life, and I suspect we have it backward. A neuroscientist named Jim Coan gave a commencement speech this spring titled “You Are a Pain in the Ass.” Community, he told the graduates, is not the same as harmony. Real connection comes with friction built in, the inconvenience of other people, their needs and interruptions and refusal to be streamlined.
That friction is not the fee you pay for belonging, Coan says. It is the belonging. We become ourselves against the resistance of one another.
Which is what makes those 338 lost words feel less like a statistic than a tally. Sociologists call the people at the edges of our lives, the barista, the neighbor who knows your name, our “weak ties,” a term Mark Granovetter coined in 1973, and one that undersells them to the point of insult.
It might be more accurate to say that these connections confirm, under no obligation, that we exist to a world beyond our own front door. You can be loved at home, surrounded even, and still go unrecognized everywhere else, a stranger in your own neighborhood, unseen in the places where no one is required to notice you.
I write here about the architecture of care, and until now I have mostly meant the people closest in, the family in the next room, the friend who answers at midnight. The weak ties are a reminder that there is a wider architecture, too, and the hello is load-bearing. Pull a few hundred small words out of a day, and a person can fall out of public view, while every close relationship stays perfectly intact.
This summer, home and unhurried for the first time in months, I am choosing the friction on purpose. I talk to the woman at the register instead of tapping my card in silence. I let the line move slowly and leave my phone in my bag, asking the man ahead of me about the sheet cake he is buying rather than auditing the lost minutes. And when a tourist looks lost, I stop and give the directions out loud, the old way, before the blue dot can beat me to it.
I am, I suspect, a mild pain in the ass to people who could have finished in silence. It is among the better things I have to offer, and the thing I most want offered back.
A Minister of Happiness was never the absurd part. The absurd part is the belief we put in her place, that happiness is something you optimize alone, frictionlessly, on a screen, rather than something built through the friction of real life itself.
The cold tea. The conversation that runs long past its natural ending because neither of you wants to be the one to leave. The smirk of a friend who loves you enough to tell you to stop being obnoxious.
I should call Mariam. Not text. Call.
This post was published at Deseret News.
Love this piece! Friction is like emotional fibre. If we eat only junk food, the illness creeps up on us. Maybe we should start calling social media and chatbots Ultra Processed Connection.