Photo by fae.
At the start of the year, Melissa was at a big event, in a fancy location, with all sorts of impressive people in attendance. Faced with a room full of interesting people, she did what any self-respecting introvert would do. Walked to the bathroom. Locked herself in the first stall. Got out her phone and texted Johnathan. Two words.
I’m rusty.
Introverts hiding in the bathroom during corporate events is so cliched that someone wrote an entire business book with that as the title. And while both of us self-describe as introverts, folks struggle to believe it. We have very public jobs where we talk for a living. What kind of introvert would pick that as a career? Let alone as the target of their entrepreneurial energy?
[It turns out lots of introverts do this. Priya says introverts make good gatherers because they build what they wish existed and what they think is missing. And those events tend to connect for a range of folks.]
So as you do when you find a thing that needs deliberate attention and focus, we attached an OKR to it. We figured that if we were feeling rusty, probably a bunch of other people were as well. So we paused our digital community events and started running more in-person. In January, HQ was full of people had braved -30 degree temps and a snowstorm to join us for coffee. To kick off, we told the story of Melissa locked in the bathroom and asked, “How many of you are also feeling a bit rusty?”
Every hand went up.
Every. Single. Hand.
You might think, well, sure, that’s because hybrid workers attended. Or remote workers. Probably the RTO crew wouldn’t have put their hands up because they have more chances to practice. But friends, you would be incorrect. The RTOers aren’t faring better because proximity isn’t the same as connection. Doing work near other people doesn’t automatically recreate serendipity, collegiality, and collaborative spirit. Never mind what your CEO or HR team might have said when they rolled out the policy.
We’ve been hearing the same punchline around RTO for several years. Here’s the gist. You get to the office and have a full day of meetings. Instead of being in a Zoom window at home. You’re in a Zoom window at work. With a more annoying commute and not nearly enough conference rooms. You’re supposed to interact with your colleagues, in theory. But they are all locked in those terrible soundproof coffin things. So you swipe the badge reader, attend the meetings, deal with the shitty commute, and head home at the end of the day.
This might be dreadful but bearable if it weren’t coming on the heels of decades of social-capital erosion. Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone came out in the early ’90s and that man has been sounding the alarm so long that his latest effort was titled Join or Die. And this version of work might be survivable if it weren’t arriving years after Anne Helen Petersen wrote Can’t Even about how waning community supports (like church) and familial supports (like relatives nearby) were driving high levels of burnout among millennials.
However rusty we were getting in the other parts of our lives, for most of us, work was a last bastion. A daily and mandatory way to stay connected to other humans. Even when we weren’t in the same office together, that connective tissue may have been threadbare but, by and large, it was still intact.
Slowly then all at once
The AI hype machine wants you to know that what’s happening with LLMs and Agents is akin to the early internet. An explosion of new possibilities, and wealth for the folks cool enough to move fast on it. And set, as tech always does, against the fearful and cynical luddites who refuse to see the glorious new potential that awaits. You can’t make an omelette without breaking 4,000 eggs. Anyhow, something something cotton gin.
We are early internet nerds. We have stacks of Wired magazine at home from the ’90s. We remember that all-caps, raised-ink, neon-glow hype. And anyone who was there knows that this boom is not like that one. Because for all the profound damage that the early internet booms wrought, for all the misguided, consequence-free disaster they created, for all the safeguards they chose not to build, and the concerns and red flags they chose to ignore — fundamentally the early internet was an experiment in using technology to connect people to each other. AI is an experiment in using technology to connect people to a bot.
A bot that teaches you things. Writes code. Does your work for you. Answers questions. Speaks kindly. Gasses you up. A bot that is contrite when caught in a lie, but never catches you in one. A bot that recommends nuclear strikes in 95% of military scenarios. Because it isn’t human, it just trained on a bunch of stolen military fanfic, and the one thing it has in common with the early internet boom is how determined its owners are to ignore the consequences.
And one consequence is that the human connection bits that have been slipping over decades of passive, reluctant retreat have now tipped over a ledge.
Because a lot of the ways the bot helps you are by taking over human interactions that you’re too tired, or distracted, or busy to handle. It can make your email sound more bubbly. It can summarize the meeting you have to skip. It can text your friend to reschedule lunch. This is, for many folks, exactly what your company is ordering you to do. Are you supposed to feel guilty about it?
Social Atrophy
We don’t need you to feel guilty. But for years we’ve been writing about the pattern of social atrophy we’ve seen creeping into work. And in the last few months that has become the loudest noise in a lot of very quiet rooms.
Bosses who aren’t talking to their peers. Who have been at a company for a year but haven’t met people outside their own team. They’re busy. But solitary, supervising-bots busy, and they’re having trouble switching it off. When we pair them with a colleague, they aren’t sure what to talk about. When we ask them, “who knows the most about that, who could teach you?” they sort of draw a blank, and mumble that they’d probably ask Claude.
This is a five-alarm fire in terms of human connection. Remember work? The last bastion? The stable source of regular, structured communication, collaboration, support, and friendship for many people?
The research on meaning at work is manifold and complex but it doesn’t oversimplify it too much to say that it boils down to, “Doing work that matters to me, with people I care about.” Even the most impactful work doesn’t tend to drive high self-reports of meaningfulness without a collective experience. If using a bot displaces some other technology — having Claude write the API call instead of looking it up yourself — that may lead to skills atrophy, okay fine. But when a bot displaces a human interaction, even a little one, you lose something crucial.
We are all rusty
The challenge with atrophy is that it’s a hard cycle to break. It’s not that people don’t care about connection at work, or want to be better at it. But when you’re rusty, it’s hard to even know where to start. We could tell you to march around the office, arms outstretched, saying “come form connection with me! I welcome it!” But you wouldn’t do it. And we can’t imagine ever asking you to.
So we are hosting more stuff in person. Low-commitment, easy stuff, just show up. And people do show up, and we give them a bit of structure, and they come along. There are these moments, every time we host one, where we sit back and just listen to the volume of the room. The 30 seconds after we give them a nudge and turn them loose are a sort of rumble, and then it’s as though someone turns a giant volume dial from 3 to 11. People know that it’s a thing they need, the energy is there, it just needs a little bit more of a boost to get rolling.
We know that not everyone can attend a thing at RSG HQ. And that often the connection you need is with colleagues, not strangers. The good news is that that is actually much easier. You have so many built-in opportunities to connect — so many actual work things you should actually talk about.
So we built this. It’s a little thing, and sort of silly, but also sort of not. If you need a little social-atrophy shove at work, it’s for you. If the first one doesn’t do it for you, spin it again. And again. Bookmark it, turn it into a slackbot, whatever. Say you’re trying a new thing, get other people to come along you, blame us if that’s helpful. But then actually do the thing. Shake off some rust.
— Melissa & Johnathan
