Ciao.
Teachecker is an app that helps men understand what women they met through Tinder or Hinge say about them after a date.
This other guy connected his smart wristband to Claude and to his calendar to work out when he’s most stressed, or worse, which people stress him at work. I assume he can’t just cancel every meeting with them, so I wonder what he does, or what he takes, to solve the problem.
It makes me think we’re entering an age of social deafness. We move through social spaces, we talk to people online and offline, but we can’t draw intelligent conclusions on our own. We need wristbands apparently smarter than we are, apps that do detective work on our near-exes, and of course our dear friend Claude to write our delicate emails and messages.
It’s a problem in almost every part of life. It’s an acute problem when it comes to our professional lives.
40% of executives fail and get let go after starting a new job. In the vast majority of cases (about 65–69% of difficult transitions, depending on the study), the reason isn’t professional ability. It’s that they don’t integrate into the organization’s culture, or can’t manage the relationships with colleagues or with the new team they’re meant to lead.
Reason #1: Working in an organization runs on the transfer of information. Most of us spend our days in meetings, solving problems, explaining diagnoses, presenting strategy or data, talking clients and partners into doing what we want. Relational capacity is an essential part of a career. Our success depends above all on grasping what our counterparts don’t say.
Think of the most successful colleagues you’ve had. I’d bet many of them are the ones who build relationships with everyone, the ones it’s a pleasure to consult, to argue with, even to be in cordial disagreement with. If we stop constantly calibrating our ability to read other people, we’ll soon be relegated to technical, routine work.
Reason #2: Anyone who claims they go to work to earn money and not to make friends is lying. Even people who see their career purely as ambition, or as a way to pay the bills, try to build genuine connections day to day. Our personal satisfaction depends also on our professional relationships. Outsourcing to a sophisticated wristband the job of working out which relationships are going better than others reduces everyday social life to an annoyance. I can’t think of a worse example of avoidance.
I wonder how we can renew our social skills. How do we go back to relating to the people around us, to the team, to the boss, without asking machines for help to be human again?
I can already picture the horde of influencers telling you to download a PDF with the 10 tactics to become the most popular leader in your office.
Fortunately, I don’t think we need tactics. Take a look at the following signals:
Average daily time on social media has stopped growing. According to a Financial Times analysis with GWI covering roughly 250,000 adults across more than 50 countries, social media use has been in steady decline since its 2022 peak. Another source (GWI via SQ Magazine) puts numbers on it: from 151 minutes a day in 2023 to 141 in 2025.
Around 22% of Gen Z see run clubs (groups that meet regularly to run together) as “the new dating app,” and over half join to meet people in person.
The Offline Club, an organization born in Amsterdam in 2021 that runs phone-free events and meetups, has expanded to 19 cities with nearly 600,000 followers.
In the most natural way imaginable, we’re returning on our own to a human way of living. Every new technology is first adopted with intensity, then “domesticated,” reduced to ordinary routine.
We’ve done it with every major technology of the last century. The rise of TV in the ‘50s sparked the fear that radio, books, magazines and cinema would become irrelevant, but radio and print adapted. The mobile phone, after the boom of the 2000s, hit a plateau, with growth already negligible by 2010. Smartphones joined the party in 2008, going from 35% of US adults in 2011 to 85% by 2021, then flattening in the low 90s. In a couple of years I’ll write the same about AI. It doesn’t mean we stop using technology, but that we give it a precise role in our lives, or replace it with a better one. We understand its limits and make the most of what it does well.
It isn’t a linear process, and it won’t happen fast, but we have enough data to see that after bouts of futurist delirium we’re capable of becoming human again. It’s more about individual proactivity than strategy. If you’re after tips like “make your colleague a coffee and ask how they’re doing” or “text three friends ‘good morning’ every morning,” you already know you’re on the wrong newsletter. If you expect to get a list of tactics to make the insights in this article actionable, you are still treating social relationships as a social media topic rather than a human capacity.
Just remember how we made friends in elementary school, or at the beach. The skills are still there. We’re the ones who have to drop the technological shortcuts we thought would make everything easier.
Join or Die. A documentary about Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and the need for community. Watchable and blunt about why joining things matters. Movie.
How's Work? Relational intelligence applied directly to colleagues and bosses, by Esther Perel. Podcast.
Community Isn’t the Cure. Apps to reduce screen time, AI companions that feel real enough, sophisticated ways to train social skills. It may work, but it probably won’t. Article.
Supercommunicators. Charles Duhigg’s most recent book on having quality conversations. Book.
Why you should talk to strangers. Kio Stark on how social skills are the opposite of a detective app. TED talk.
There is no loneliness epidemic, we're choosing to be anti-social. My personal favorite. We keep treating the social issue as something that happens to us, but we are responsible for it. Article.
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Speak soon,
Avy
P.S. - I am mostly active on LinkedIn and Substack. The first one for work, the second one for my soul. Let’s connect!
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