The next workplace crisis isn’t burnout. It’s social atrophy.
Esther Perel dropped a warning for leaders last week: your workforce is suffering from “social atrophy.” AI is accelerating it.
I’ve been calling it social muscle atrophy (SMA) for a year. Perel just gave it a bigger stage.
SMA is what happens when social skills and stamina wither from lack of real-world use. Dead-air Zooms. Avoided conversations. Teams that technically function but no longer *feel* like teams.
The data is uglier than the hunch
My firm ran a national study of American workers. The numbers were worse—and more precise—than expected.
Thirty percent of working Americans said they’d rather clean a toilet than ask a colleague for help.
Read that again. They’d risk the poo particles over a slightly awkward ask.
The people you’d expect to be most fluent are the most damaged. Executives reported “false self-sufficiency”—the belief they should handle everything alone—at 43%. Managers sat at 28%. Individual contributors at 27%.
The higher you climb, the harder you white-knuckle it alone. Asking for help starts to feel like failure, even though research shows it’s one of the fastest ways to build trust.
SMA doesn’t care about your title.
Convenience is costing us connection
Perel is right: AI is quietly absorbing the minutes we used to spend on each other. Ask the chatbot instead of the colleague, and you don’t just skip one exchange—you erase every unplanned conversation that might have followed.
Teams were already primed for this. Fifty-six percent of workers said they’d rather tackle a project solo, even though 84% know social strength is essential for navigating change.
They wanted to go it alone. AI handed them a frictionless exit.
I watched it happen with a sharp director of engineering at a mid-size fintech. For years, people brought her their hardest problems. She’d earned the open-door reputation. Lately she routed every ambiguous question through an AI assistant—“faster, and no meeting required.”
Six months later she realized she hadn’t had a real problem-solving conversation with her team since spring. The code still shipped. The relationships had gone stiff. The work got done. The team stopped being a team.
Rebuild the muscle the only way that works
No 12-week initiative. No consulting deck.
Reps.
One deliberately clunky, human exchange a day that you could have outsourced to a screen. Ask the colleague instead of the chatbot. Bring the messy, half-formed idea to a person before you sand it into a clean prompt.
If you lead, your reps are structural. Design the environment so human moments happen on purpose, not by accident. Turn the workplace back into a place for connection, not an efficiency machine that starves it.
If that makes you squirm, good. The discomfort is the workout.
That’s the core of my last book, *Good Awkward*. The cringe you’re dodging is usually the exact rep you need. It’s the same thread I pull hardest in my next one, *The Signal Gap*, out this November: the human skills that make you believable and influential are the exact ones we’re busy automating away.
Social muscles atrophy because we stopped using them. That also means they’re still entirely ours to rebuild—one gloriously awkward conversation at a time.