A conversation with Dr. Tracy Brower, sociologist and author of Critical Connections, on why friendship is declining across every age group, what AI is doing to our ability to trust each other, and the research-backed reason why the most interesting person at any party is usually the one doing the least talking.
Why Workplace Loneliness Keeps Getting Worse
Tracy Brower has spent her career studying what makes work meaningful and what makes people thrive inside organizations. Her previous books tackled work-life balance and the conditions for happiness at work. But the more she examined those questions, the more one variable kept surfacing with blinking lights around it: connection. Whether someone was an introvert or an extrovert, whether they loved their job or merely tolerated it, the presence or absence of genuine human connection was doing more work than almost anything else.
Her new book, Critical Connections, is the result. And the research she opens with is hard to brush past. More than half of adults globally report feeling lonely and lacking a sense of belonging. Friendship is declining across every age group, with 27% of young men saying they don’t have a single friend. And 51% of people in a recent study said they would trade a 10% salary increase for a greater sense of belonging at work.
These numbers represent a trajectory. “We’re on an upward trend, unfortunately,” Tracy told me. And the forces driving it, like social media, the pandemic, remote work, AI, and the frictionless convenience of modern life, have been stacking on top of each other for years without much of a counterforce in sight.
How Convenience Became the Enemy of Connection
One of the more uncomfortable arguments in the book is that a lot of what we’ve built to make our lives easier has quietly made them lonelier. We order food through apps and check a box that says we don’t want to talk to the delivery driver. We skip the line at the coffee shop and never make eye contact with the barista. We handle transactions that once required human contact through interfaces designed to eliminate it entirely.
“We’ve removed friction,” Tracy said, “but a lot of friction is actual human relationships.” Research she cites in the book finds that even superficial interactions, the kind that most of us barely register, drive a meaningful sense of belonging and community membership. The small talk we’ve optimized away was doing more for us than we realized.
This shows up most acutely for younger workers entering the workforce in fully remote environments. The oldest members of Gen Z had roughly one year of what Tracy calls “normal work” before COVID arrived. Those who are younger have largely built their professional identity without ever experiencing the casual, accumulative relationship-building that happens when people share physical space. “There’s data that the younger people are, the more likely they are to say they don’t feel comfortable in social situations and [that] they lack social skills,” she said. The reference point simply isn’t there.
What AI Is Doing to Trust at Work
Tracy is careful not to be dismissive of AI. She wants the efficiency it brings and thinks most people should be leaning into it rather than away from it. But she draws a clear line around one specific use: replacing the human expression in relationships.
The example that stuck with her was an architecture and design firm that had started using AI to write thank-you notes to clients at the end of projects. Notes that had previously been handwritten, personal, and specific. “It totally made a difference in the culture,” she said, but then “all of a sudden, [AI] removed that authentic human connection, that authentic gratitude.” The client on the other end felt it. So did the people inside the firm, because they were no longer putting their own hearts into the gesture.
The deeper problem, she argues, is what happens to trust when people start to wonder whether what they’re reading actually came from the person who sent it. “Now I wonder if that thing you wrote is AI, and I’m not sure it was really you.” She uses the term “cognitive surrender” to distinguish it from “cognitive offloading,” which she considers healthy and necessary. Offloading relies on your environment, teammates, and routines to reduce unnecessary mental effort. Surrender is handing over the things that make you distinctly human. “If we’re using AI for efficiency and left-brain things, great. But if we’re replacing people with AI for relationship-oriented work, we do that to our detriment.”
The three things she believes humans need to hold onto, regardless of what AI can do, are curiosity, creativity, and connection. Those are the domains worth protecting.
How Many Close Friends Can You Actually Keep
It takes about 60 hours to make a friend. Tracy cites this research matter-of-factly, but the implication lands hard when you actually sit with it. Sixty hours, accumulated slowly through coffee conversations, brief chats before a meeting, a walk together, a shared project. At that pace, the number of close friendships any of us can realistically maintain is smaller than most people assume.
The sociologist Robin Dunbar mapped this out through what Tracy describes as concentric circles of relationship. The two or three closest people in your life tend to stay with you for most of it. The next ring out holds about five, then ten, then fifteen. The maximum number of people any of us can meaningfully track, knowing what’s going on in their lives, their families, their work, is around 150, and that number is set by the size of the human brain.
What this means practically is that friendship requires choices. Not every connection can be a close one, and the relationships that drift when context changes, when a project ends, when kids age out of the same soccer league, aren’t failures. They’re normal. “It’s reasonable that we have ebbs and flows in our relationships,” Tracy said. The ones worth protecting are the ones worth being intentional about.
And intentionality, she’s found, is exactly what most people are missing. Surprisingly, 61% of people rank friendship as their top priority for living a good life, ahead of money, marriage, and having children. But knowing friendship matters isn’t the same as doing the work friendship requires. Getting over the threshold, reaching out, showing up consistently over time — those are the unglamorous mechanics of something people say they want but struggle to actually build.
The Most Interesting Person at the Party
For anyone who finds the prospect of building new friendships genuinely daunting, Tracy offers some research that reframes the whole challenge. In a study where researchers tracked social dynamics at a party and then asked attendees who they found most interesting, the answer was consistent: the person who had spent the most time listening, not talking.
“We don’t have to be all that,” she said. “We can just be present and listen and ask good questions.” The pressure to be funny or impressive or memorable, she argues, is almost entirely self-imposed and works against the thing that actually draws people in.
She recommends starting with structure when social anxiety is a factor. A formal event, a club meeting, or a shared-interest group reduces the burden of knowing what to say because the context does some of that work. And shared experiences, particularly hard or challenging ones done together, build connection faster than any carefully planned social event. “The best team bonding comes from doing hard things together,” she told me. “When leaders give us common goals and shared outcomes, that makes a real difference in terms of being able to come together and rely on each other.”
Why Work Is Where Most People Make Different Friends
One of the more surprising findings Tracy shares concerns the source of diverse friendships. Just over 80% of us make our more diverse friendships at work, not in our neighborhoods or our social circles. And research suggests that when about half of your network is meaningfully different from you, the outcomes for wellbeing, fulfillment, and happiness are the strongest.
This makes the workplace a uniquely important site for the kind of connection that actually broadens how people see the world. Tracy recommends starting with similarity rather than difference, finding the common ground in values and shared human experience before moving to what makes people’s perspectives distinct. “How are we similar as human beings? And then, how do you think about this differently?”
For leaders specifically, she frames this as a design challenge rather than a cultural one. Who mentors whom? Which projects cross departmental lines? Whether people get opportunities to work adjacent to their usual swim lane. These structural choices shape the conditions for connection more reliably than any team-building event. “The best team building comes from doing hard things together,” she repeated, and it’s worth taking seriously. An escape room is fine, but a shared challenge with real stakes is better.
What Connection Actually Takes
What Tracy keeps returning to, across all the data and all the research, is something simpler than any framework: people need to feel known. Not seen in the social media sense, not followed or liked or algorithmically validated, but actually known by other people who show up consistently over time. The health outcomes associated with that, such as cardiovascular function, longevity, mental health, and cognitive resilience, are as significant as those associated with diet or exercise. Two or three close friends, the research from BYU suggests, matter more to health than most of what we spend our health dollars on.
The good news is that none of this requires a personality transplant or a radical restructuring of daily life. It requires showing up, asking questions, putting down the phone, and accepting that building something real takes time. Sixty hours is a lot, but it’s also completely achievable, one coffee at a time.
Brandon Laws is the host of Transform Your Workplace and the VP of Marketing and Product at Xenium HR, an outsourced HR and payroll partner for small and mid-sized businesses in Portland, Oregon.