We are living in a time of compression. Every facet of our modern lives—from the way we buy groceries to the way we find a partner—is being filtered through the lens of efficiency. We have become experts at identifying waste. We trim the fat from our schedules, automate our reminders, and use AI to summarize the sprawling, messy threads of our digital lives into three bullet points. We treat time like a high-yield portfolio: if a minute isn’t producing a tangible return, it’s a minute lost.
But this logic has a hidden cost. We’ve reached a point where we view a phone call that lasts forty minutes as time lost when the same information could have been conveyed in a two-sentence text. We rely on asynchronous communication to dodge the perceived messiness of a live interaction. We are optimizing our connections until they are frictionless, and in doing so, we are making them weightless.
Texting is efficient. Calling is inefficient.
And that is exactly why calling matters.
The Boundary: Productivity vs. Presence
Before we defend the indirect route, we have to draw a boundary. In a professional setting, efficiency is often a virtue. As someone who has spent years leading research programs and teams in tech, I know that documentation should be crisp and meetings should have clear agendas. In the office, rambling isn’t a gift; it’s a tax on the team’s velocity.
However, we are seeing a dangerous spillover. We’ve started applying professional optimization logic to our personal lives, and conversely, we’re forgetting that even at work, trust is not a transactional output. You can optimize a process, but you cannot optimize a person. Whether you are managing a product roadmap or a lifelong friendship, the moments that actually cement a bond are also often the ones that an algorithm would flag as redundant.
The Myth of the Shortest Path
In my writing exploring how technology can serve as a “collaborative engine”—a teammate rather than a mere proxy—I remark on a widespread notion that technology’s ultimate goal is to remove the noise from human interaction. The theory is that if we can just get the information across faster, we will have more time for the things that matter.
But this assumes that relationships are about information exchange. They aren’t. If I text you to say I’m overwhelmed with a project and you reply with a “thumbs up” or a “you got this,” the information has been exchanged with absolute efficiency. But the relationship hasn’t moved an inch.
Trust is built in the time that’s “lost.” It is built in the awkward three-second silence on a phone line where neither person knows what to say, but neither person hangs up. It’s built in the “umms,” the “ahhs,” and the unexpected tangents that have absolutely nothing to do with the reason you called.
In social science, this is categorized under “phatic communication”—speech that doesn’t necessarily convey new information but performs a vital social function. It’s the verbal equivalent of a handshake. When we optimize our personal connections for speed, we are essentially trying to have the handshake without the hand.
Friction as “Proof of Work”
There is a cold, mechanical reality to trust: it requires an investment of a non-renewable resource. In the world of blockchain, we talk about “proof of work” to validate a transaction. Human intimacy operates on a similar principle.
When you send a text, the cost to you is near zero. The recipient knows this. When your phone suggests a smart reply and you click it, the cost is literally zero. These are low-stakes interactions. But when you stay on a phone call for an hour, you are providing a visible, tangible sacrifice of your most limited resource: your time.
The inefficiency of the call is the very thing that signals its value. You are saying, “You are worth more to me than the ten other things I could be doing with this hour.” You cannot download that kind of investment. You cannot automate the feeling of being prioritized.
When we optimize exclusively for time efficiency—using AI to summarize our friends’ long-winded voice notes or relying on asynchronous check-ins—we aren’t just saving time. We are often devaluing the currency of the relationship. We are telling the other person that their inefficiencies—their pauses, their hesitations, their non-linear thoughts—are a nuisance to be filtered out.
The Teammate vs. The Proxy
This isn’t an anti-technology manifesto. I’ve spent my career building tools to evolve expression and creativity. But we have to be clear about what these tools are for.
As I’ve advocated in my writing on human-centered research, AI works best when it functions as a teammate—handling the logistical overhead of our lives so that we are freed up for the high-bandwidth human work. AI should be the one scheduling the meeting or organizing the project notes. It should not be the one participating in the relationship on our behalf.
The danger arises when we treat AI as a proxy for our social selves. If you use a tool to stay in touch with a broad network, you aren’t actually in touch with anyone; you are managing a database. Connection requires the risk of being misunderstood, the vulnerability of a live response, and the patience to listen to a story that doesn’t have a pre-determined point.
We don’t need frictionless friendships. We need the kind of friction that keeps us grounded.
Reclaiming the Pause
The shift toward total optimization is often framed as an ethical pursuit—that we are being respectful of other people’s time by not bothering them with a call. But this is often a form of social distancing disguised as politeness. We are protecting ourselves from the unpredictability of a real-time human being.
To build a truly human-centered future, we have to resist the urge to turn our private lives into a series of tasks to be completed. We have to be willing to be unproductive with the people who matter.
This doesn’t mean we should abandon texting or go back to an era of total inefficiency. It means we should recognize when a tool is helping us connect and when it is helping us to be avoidant. It means acknowledging that the most valuable moments in our lives are often the ones that would be the first to be cut by an optimization algorithm.
The next time you’re about to send a quick check-in text to someone you care about, consider the inefficient alternative. Pick up the phone. Embrace the awkward silence. Listen to the tangent.
In an age of perfect summaries and lightning-fast replies, the most rebellious thing you can do is give someone your undivided, unoptimized, and beautifully wasted time.