It seems like less and less people nowadays are good communicators. When I send emails or text messages, whether it's for business or to friends, it seems like more often than not, I won't receive a reply. Even ten years ago, it seems like the problem wasn't this widespread. I have to keep a mental register of loose ends to follow up with, once the appropriate window of time has passed. For non-essential business, I'll send a follow-up "Hey, just making sure you saw this!" message two days after my first unanswered query, then a week after that one if there's still no reply, then two weeks, and so on. And for urgent business, it's as frequently as I can, without being too much of a nag. It is depressing how far down the no-answer protocol I'll get on a regular basis.
Another one is when people flake out or are running late for an appointment, but don't tell me. Is it too much to ask for an "I'm running late, my new ETA is ___" text? I shouldn't have to ask this many people where they are when they're running 20+ minutes late, and I certainly shouldn't have to ask twice.
Another favourite is when I ask someone in person if they saw my message, and they hit me with, "Yeah, but I didn't want to answer, because I'd have to tell you <unfavorable answer>." OK THEN. JUST TELL ME THAT. I'm literally more upset by being left in the dark than I am by hearing whatever bad news you have for me.
It's just a lot of mental energy that I have to expend on stupid shit, and I'm sick of it. I wish everyone would just get their collective act together. It really isn't that hard to check your texts/emails at least once per day, to go through them one by one to make sure none fall through the cracks, and to mark them as unread / set a reminder to follow up on it if you get interrupted while reading it. I've had to juggle dozens of different communiques at a time before, and even then, I made sure to respond to all of them in as timely of a fashion as I could.
In the words of Mr. Peanutbutter, "I'm starting to think smartphones are actually making us less connected."
twovests wrote
I think the pandemic might have forced a big hit. For me, the social skills I had built up in the ~4 years leading up to lockdown were basically entirely wiped away by isolation.
I've been thinking a lot about ways communication was essential for day-to-day life, and how preferences wiped that away entirely. I became an adult when self-checkout was in every grocery store I'd been to. And those shitty kiosks that fast-food joints like Dunkin Donuts have are really nice, because they take away the time pressure of trying to make decisions by squinting at a distant menu that's constantly sliding and fading. But it also means another place where we can avoid actual human interaction.
Not to get Spiritual, but every consciousness is kind of an amazing thing? We're all wet, small, imperfect models of the universe around us, and when people come together, we make a bigger, wetter, more perfect model of the universe around us. When people say "math is beautiful" and "science is beautiful", it shares that same beauty that exists when people come together.
I grew up with people bemoaning downward trends which didn't actually exist. ("People are getting dumber!" no they weren't. "Crime is going up!" the numbers say otherwise.) But now the downward trends are real and the idea of people getting even worse at communicating is scary. But I think you're right and it's a downward trend that is also happening.