I used to be shy. I still am, in a way. It’s sometimes hard for me to put myself out there.

But I once did not know how to talk to people. I assumed this was an innate feature. Some people are better small-talkers, I thought. Some people have more swag, or rizz, or whatever. Random socializing was just not for me, I thought.

For two decades, I got along fine in this state. I had friends. In large groups I might’ve fallen silent, but this did not impact my social life, or so I thought. When alone, I moved through the world in my own world. Headphones on on the train. This never really bothered me.

And then, at the age of 20, a man named Fred, the news director of a tiny NPR station in rural Western Massachusetts, where I was doing my first-ever internship, handed me a microphone. He told me to go interview people. I was terrified. I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t, I realized, know how to talk to people! So Fred sent me to an event down the road from the studio. U.S. Representative Barney Frank was speaking at a community center. Fred told me to walk up to him after his speech and ask him some hard-hitting questions.

All I remember is that my hand was so sweaty that the microphone kept slipping out of it as I pushed past the audience and towards the Representative. The rest I can’t recall—I’d kinda blacked out.

I’ve been a journalist for the past 15 years, and the biggest thing it’s taught me is that everything involving human interaction—understanding others and listening to them deeply, and making your own words intelligible enough to be understood by others deeply—requires practice. Socializing is a skill. You can get better at it. You can, if you fall out of practice, get worse at it.

Our environment directly impacts our abilities to practice this skill, of course. If you live in a tennis academy, you’re more likely to get better at tennis than if you live nowhere near a court, or don’t even have a racket.

Our current built environment does not encourage practicing the skill of socializing. Usually, it actively discourages it. The suburbs trap us apart from each other; phones help keep our heads pointed downward so that there is less spontaneous conversation in public, even if we live in crowded cities.

And so we as a society have gotten progressively worse at everything that once made our lives tick and flourish. People don’t know how to flirt anymore; people don’t know how to make friends anymore. What was the last time you approached someone at a bar or a bookstore and struck up a conversation?

This de-skilling creates a self-perpetuating downward spiral: the less we practice socializing, the worse we become at it; the worse we become at it, the less we feel comfortable practicing it. What might have once caused slight discomfort—going up to the cute girl at the coffee shop or whatever—now causes your nervous system to go into overdrive. And, worse still, because that theoretical girl lives in the same society as you, the one in which speaking to strangers has become something quite strange, if you do approach her, there’s more chance than there used to be that she’ll find it off-putting. The spiral towards complete automatonization intensifies.

I have a lot of empathy for the de-skilled in this scenario. It’s not your fault that the world has made it that much harder for you to form connection. You did not create the suburbs. You did not invent the iPhone.

But I have less empathy for how we’ve begun to excuse our inability to socialize as something innate, neutral, or even good. It’s easy to blame people like incels for unfairly lashing out at society for something—their inability to socialize—that they could theoretically improve on themselves. But do many of us not do something similar? How many of us find identities through which we abdicate our responsibility for living in a pro-social world?

Without negating the realness of neurodivergence, I think it’s fine to say that we live in a culture that excuses our lack of practice and skill at socializing via diagnosis and identity.

Autism, for example, is the perfect diagnosis for the internet era because it frames the purposeful social de-skilling brought about by the internet as something innate within each person, rather than wrought upon you by massive corporations that have a vested interest in keeping you isolated and under-socialized. And it has been joined by a host of other DSM diagnoses that help people excuse their lack of social ability and lack of opportunity to practice it. On TikTok, teens who’ve never been given much chance to learn how to interact with each other decide they have BPD or other personality disorders as a way to explain away their lack of ability to make connections.

It’s no coincidence that the masters of our economic and political systems, despite being anti-identity politics and generally fascist-leaning, make exceptions for specific forms of neurodivergence—both Elon Musk and the CEO of Palantir Alex Karp identify as autistic, for example. They’ve built the world to suit their preferred forms of socializing and preferred views of humanity and in doing so, molded our own minds to be more like theirs—dependent on the technologies they create to mediate every interaction and interpretation of the world...