Are We Facing the Death of Social Agility?

I am in a small town in Ireland, county Sligo, attending a friend’s wedding. I travel a lot, sometimes 5 to 7 countries a month, and I like to do a little experiment. I walk into any Walgreens, Kmart, Tescos or shop with real-life retail assistants and I ask for an item. Most of the time I am sincerely looking for an item and sometimes I am just testing. I am testing to see the level of engagement in the interaction of the often Gen Z retail assistant serving me. Does my direct eye contact make them feel awkward? How long does it take to get an answer? Is there a smile? My interaction in Ireland was in May and it really stood out to me of all my travels since then. Firstly, the general human connection skills of the people I had been connecting with in Sligo was amazing. You can see a video of the warm and charismatic locals keen for a chat and to proudly show you the best of their culture, linked HERE. You’ll also notice the age of those in the video, they aren’t Gen Z.

So on this grey evening in May, I asked a reed-thin person in the local Tescos in his early twenties for the location of my favourite processed meat, the British icon that is the Peperami. He paused. The pause was long and deep for someone like me who lives in Singapore. Where a pause is more of a hyper-compressed gasping for breath, an all-in-all different anxiety (that has little to do with my work in human connection so we won’t be writing more on that today). This pause in Ireland was borne of something else, the anxiety of a generation experiencing the death of social agility. More on this in a moment...

The young man then glances around my head anxiously, eyes darting everywhere except to me, who is looking to catch his gaze in a sort of weird bobble-head dance we’re doing. When he finally decides what to do, he picks up his phone, still yet to look me in the eye, and instead of walking me to the place in the store where it was most-likely, my coveted Peperami would live, he just searches the item in his phone in the store's app and then shows me on his phone where they could be in the store. I said I already went to the section and saw what they had, I was asking him if he knew where the single sticks were as I was only one person on holiday and didn’t want a family-sized bag. He almost winced at this flourish of information, the kind of “small talk” that I once watched my own shopkeeper father tease entire life-long relationships out of from his regular customers. For this young man, it all was too much. I thanked him and he skulked away.

I have been researching since then why in many places I visit, this is what I am seeing when connecting with the generation who were robbed of so much social connection during the pandemic. I picked up Jonathan Haidt’s incredible The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness and as a non-mother found myself clutching my Cavalier King Charles puppy in concern for all my nieces and nephews around the world. If you are a parent proceed with caution with this book but it is nevertheless a fascinating read. In it, Haidt talks about something which was very apparent in my interaction in Ireland and all over the world with people in this age group of around 15 to 22. I call it a lack of social agility, the ability to be present in the moment and respond in a reciprocal ballet with the person you’re interacting with. The beats are awkward, the response distracted, the interaction unnecessarily mediated by the phone and the emotional labour involved to pull the person back to the present rather exhausting. It doesn’t flow the way it feels when one connects with people not in this age band. So what’s the cause?

Haidt talks about the fact that this generation has grown up with asynchronous communication, this means communication is “happening via text-based posts and comments.” What Haidt doesn’t point out and I think has to do with the disconnected rhythm on the interaction I encountered, is that asynchronous communication allows a person to mediate, curate and draft their response to the person on the other end over a long period of time. This means the agility of being asked to be witty or have banter can of course be anxiety-inducing. Let’s not even imagine the anxiety for these poor young people of having to deal with a difficult or friction-filled conversation in real-time.

I was the last generation to enjoy a synchronous, play-based childhood, according to Haidt, this means that human connections were happening “at the same time, with subtle cues about timing and turn taking.” Most of us in the human connection and conscious living arena have known for such a long time, that the act of synchronisation is vital for human connection. Our ancestors living in tribes required men hunting together at the same time in order to ensure better yield and survival, women cooking together in large groups, singing, drumming and chanting, all happening together at the same time. Even with large corporate audiences, when I simply get everyone to breathe at the same time, you can hear the haunting hush come over the audience by just 30 seconds in. Our bodies and minds want to be in this state when in the presence of others. Our need to be in synchrony is backed by science.

First discovered in the brains of monkeys, mirror neurons, respond to actions that we observe in others, the mirror neurons fire in the same way when we actually recreate that action ourselves. They are fundamental to what it means to be human, allowing us to feel empathy for the experience of others and then seamlessly match the emotional mood in a situation. An early, consistent finding is that when people converse or share an experience, their brain waves synchronize. Brainscans of this process show matching patterns, like dancers moving together.

This is something that powerful communicators, many of us who enjoyed synchronous non-phone based childhoods do quite instinctually. In Charles Duhigg’s Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection the author talks about something I mention a lot in my keynotes, the power of “matching.” Of understanding that to be persuasive, we must use this mirroring which is part of our biology to our advantage. He cites that the fact “… that communication comes from connection and alignment-is so fundamental that it has become known as the matching principle.” Someone needs to give my friend at Tescos the memo.

So what’s my advice as a geek in the human connection and loneliness field, if you’re parenting an adolescent feeling disconnected and socially anxious? Get them practicing matching in real-time synchronous conversation. Where they can flex the reps of learning to align eye contact, gestures and emotional mood of the person they are connecting with. Get them into activities where they have to synch their mirror neurons like choir, team sports and dance. The historical wiring is there in our DNA, we just need to give it a little nudge to get back after a pandemic that has undone so much.

Simone Heng is a human connection specialist and award-winning author. Her mission is to inspire people to connect in a world thirsty for connection. She has spoken to thousands, and for organizations like Harvard University, Google, Meta, the United Nations, and many more. Simone and her work have been featured on CNN and Al Jazeera and in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, BBCRadio, and many others.

Simone is based and was born in Singapore but has also studied in Switzerland, was raised in Australia, and worked in the United Arab Emirate.

Her book Let’s Talk About Loneliness is the winner of the 2024 silver Nautilus Book Award in the social change and social justice category. It is also a finalist in 4 categories at the 2024 International Book Awards. Simone also sits on the advisory board for the Foundation for Social Connection in the United States.

PS. Join leaders, managers and other professionals who are increasing their well-being, productivity and creativity through the power of connection at work by visiting my #LinkedInLearning course. Get it here: https://lnkd.in/gfaT27-h