Why some young adults need to learn how to talk to people again

At 31, Faith Tay froze mid-meeting.

She wasn’t unprepared. She had notes. She’d rehearsed what she wanted to say. But when her turn came on the Zoom screen—camera on, everyone watching—her mind blanked. Her throat tightened. Her heart raced. Nothing came out. A colleague asked gently if she was okay. She nodded, mute. Another teammate jumped in to deliver her points. The meeting moved on. But Faith didn’t.

She sat in stunned silence, staring at her reflection in the screen, watching the moment replay in her mind—again and again. That wasn’t a mistake. That was a breakdown. And she wasn’t the only one feeling it. Across group chats, Reddit threads, campus forums, and HR onboarding rooms, one message keeps surfacing: I don’t know how to talk to people anymore. Not in a jokey, “haha I’m so awkward” way. In a real, gut-level, identity-rattling way.

Some young adults are signing up for conversation classes. Others are watching TikToks on how to start a sentence. A few are quietly Googling things like “how to be normal again.” This isn’t about etiquette or charisma. It’s not about public speaking or social anxiety. It’s something stranger: a shared cultural moment where talking—casually, confidently, face-to-face—suddenly feels like a lost skill.

Let’s be clear. This isn’t just a personality trait. It’s a systemic shift. In the span of a few short years, we replaced in-person interactions with digital ones. Not out of choice, but necessity. Group chats instead of cafeteria tables. Zoom calls instead of hallway chats. Emojis instead of eye contact. We got used to typing instead of speaking. We stopped catching people’s expressions in real time. We got good at buffering, curating, pausing. We became fluent in asynchronous interaction—and that fluency came at a cost.

We started second-guessing how to enter a conversation. Or how long a pause should be. Or whether our voice sounded weird. Or whether it was even worth speaking up at all. Some people call it “post-pandemic social rust.” Others call it a symptom of digital life. Either way, the feeling is the same: we’re out of sync with our own social instincts.

There’s a special kind of exhaustion that comes from staring at yourself for hours while pretending to be engaged. During the height of the pandemic, platforms like Zoom and Google Meet became our default spaces for school, work, therapy, dates—even birthday parties. But they also trained us into new habits: watching ourselves, delaying reactions, reading a Brady Bunch grid of heads instead of full-body cues.

Now, those habits linger. Even in person, people talk about “muting themselves” metaphorically. As in: holding back. Freezing. Forgetting how to jump in. Worrying how they come across. It’s not stage fright. It’s surveillance fatigue. We’ve internalized the lens. And when we try to step out of it—to speak off-script, live, unfiltered—it feels raw. Exposing. Risky.

Before, we had scripts. “How was your weekend?” “Did you see the game?” “This weather’s wild.” But those casual openers depended on shared time, space, and rhythm. They made sense in offices, classrooms, commutes, or coffee shops. Without those backdrops, our social playbooks crumbled.

Worse, many young adults now associate those settings with discomfort. Forced returns. Hybrid awkwardness. Catch-ups that feel like interrogations. You show up, they say, “So what have you been up to?” and suddenly it’s like your entire personality is under review. So people retreat. They keep headphones in. They walk faster. They go straight to their desks. Not because they hate people—but because the friction of figuring out what to say feels heavier than silence.

And that’s where things get interesting. Because for all our social fatigue, we still crave connection. We still want to belong. We still want to feel seen. That desire has quietly created demand—for classes, content, and communities that teach us how to talk again.

You’ve got improv courses rebranded as “collaboration accelerators.” Startup bootcamps adding “vocal confidence” workshops. University clubs offering “social fluency” labs. TikTokers explaining “how to hold eye contact without freaking out.” Reddit threads where people script out how to ask a coworker to lunch.

Even apps are getting in on it—designing AI chat coaches and mock interview simulators for people who just want to sound human again. It’s easy to laugh. But it’s also easy to see why it matters. Because for a lot of people, the alternative to these awkward attempts… is isolation.

Underneath all of this is a deeper tension: the fear of being misinterpreted. When you haven’t spoken aloud much in a while, your voice feels foreign. You stumble over phrasing. You speak too fast, or too softly. You get interrupted. Or worse—you’re met with silence.

And because we’re so unused to casual repair—those “oops, wait, I meant…” moments—we assume the worst. That we’ve embarrassed ourselves. That we’ve lost all social skills. That we’re doomed to be that weird coworker, forever. This makes people withdraw further. They think: I’m not good at this. They think: Other people find it easier. They don’t realize most of us are faking it, fumbling, feeling the same static underneath.

In past generations, awkwardness was a phase you grew out of. Now, for many young adults, it feels like a condition you never shake off. Because the tools of modern life—apps, screens, platforms—are designed to remove awkwardness. And they’re good at it. Too good. We don’t have to call. We can text. We don’t have to answer. We can ghost. We don’t have to show up unprepared. We can lurk, scroll, rehearse.

And while all of that can be protective, it also means we don’t get the repetitions that build social resilience. We avoid the friction—and lose the fluency. That’s what these “talk again” workshops are trying to restore. Not just skill, but tolerance. The ability to say something clumsy, and keep going. To be misheard, and try again. To have a bad conversation and not make it mean something about your worth.

This goes deeper than personal awkwardness. In the workplace, it shows up in miscommunication, feedback avoidance, delayed collaboration. New hires who don’t know how to ask for help. Managers who default to Slack instead of walking over. Zoom teams where no one turns their camera on, even when they’re in the same building.

In dating, it shows up as app fatigue, emoji misfires, unmatched expectations. People who say, “Let’s meet up” but panic when it happens. People who don’t know how to flirt in real time. People who feel rejected when the vibe shifts—even slightly—mid-convo.

In friendships, it shows up as disappearing acts. Not out of cruelty, but out of confusion. People don’t know how to reconnect after time apart. They ghost instead of explain. They spiral instead of check in. It’s not that we don’t care. It’s that the threshold for talking—really talking—feels too high. So we stay quiet. Until loneliness takes over.

Maybe what we need isn’t just practice. It’s permission. Permission to be a little rusty. To pause. To mess up the order of our thoughts. To say “wait, let me try that again.” To laugh nervously and still feel welcome. Social skills aren’t like riding a bike. They’re more like singing. If you don’t do it for a while, your range narrows. Your voice shakes. You go flat.

But the only way to get better is to do it—badly at first. To show up for coffee and not know how to start. To chat with a cashier and feel clunky. To join a group hang and say something weird. To survive it. To do it again. We don’t need to be perfect speakers. We need to be braver listeners. We need to normalize the wobble.

If people are seeking out “how to talk” classes, it’s not because they’re socially broken. It’s because they want back in. Into conversation. Community. Companionship. The dailiness of human interaction—messy, warm, alive. And if the idea of needing to relearn how to talk sounds dystopian, maybe that’s the point. It signals something real about where we’ve been—and where we want to go next. Maybe it’s not about becoming polished. Maybe it’s about becoming porous again. Willing to be affected. Willing to engage without a script.

It’s about reclaiming a rhythm we didn’t realize we’d lost. The rhythm of noticing someone’s tone shift, and responding. The rhythm of interrupting gently, and being forgiven. The rhythm of laughing mid-sentence because you remembered something silly. The rhythm of pausing—and not needing to fill the silence. Faith Tay didn’t quit because of that one moment. But that moment showed her something. That conversation wasn’t just a skill to master. It was a lifeline to rebuild.

She’s not alone. None of us are. So if you feel awkward, rusty, hesitant—good. It means you’re still reaching. And that’s the whole point. We don’t need better words. We just need to keep trying to speak. Even when our voice shakes. Even when the silence stretches. Even when we don’t know how to start. Especially then.