The Numbers Come First
From 2007 to the most recent estimate in the dataset, the average number of words a person spoke daily fell from 15,959 to 12,792 — a drop of 28% over 14 years, according to a paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science. The researchers, Valeria Pfeifer of the University of Missouri–Kansas City and Matthias Mehl of the University of Arizona, combined data from 22 separate studies conducted between 2005 and 2019, covering 2,197 participants ages 10 to 94, mostly in the U.S. but also in Mexico, Australia, and Europe.
The rate of decline translates to approximately 338 fewer words spoken per day for every year that passed since 2005. Pfeifer told Fortune: 'That loss of words really adds up to a staggering number.'
Younger Adults Are Losing Ground Faster
The decline was not uniform. Participants under 25 lost an average of 451 words per day per year, compared with 314 for those 25 and older — a 44% steeper rate of decline for the younger cohort. Each participant wore a passive recording device that captured snippets of their daily activity, which researchers used to estimate spoken-word totals.
Pfeifer did not attribute the trend primarily to screen time or social media. Instead, she pointed to what she called the convenience economy: food-delivery apps, self-checkout kiosks, and mobile coffee orders that eliminate the need to speak to another person entirely. 'Younger adults are more likely to use an app to order food as opposed to going somewhere and actually eating it there,' she said.
Efficiency at What Cost?
Jessica Finlay, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Colorado–Boulder, has documented a parallel erosion of what sociologists call 'third places' — the routine stops, like a grocery run or a coffee counter, that once doubled as low-stakes social infrastructure. Finlay describes this everyday contact as 'the science of small encounters,' part of a person's broader 'relational portfolio' of daily interactions beyond close friends or family.
Pfeifer framed the efficiency argument itself as worth interrogating. 'Are we really making it more efficient?' she said. 'And is that really something that's desirable to us? I think is a question that we should certainly be causing more now.' She noted that time spent waiting — traditionally labeled 'wasted' — can in practice offer a break from the pressure to be constantly productive.
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Free enterprise built the convenience economy, and there is nothing inherently wrong with apps, kiosks, or delivery services — they are products consumers chose voluntarily. But the data here describe a second-order cost that no balance sheet captures: the slow dissolution of the informal social fabric that sustains civil society and, ultimately, the trust on which commerce itself depends.
The market is efficient at pricing what people say they want in the moment. It is less efficient at pricing what they quietly lose over 14 years. Policymakers who treat every friction as a problem to be optimized away should read these numbers carefully. Not every waiting line is waste. Some of it was civilization.
