Someone with a venture capital stipend and an Apple Watch recently decided that human speech has too much latency. We are now supposed to treat a cup of coffee with a friend like an asynchronous standup meeting, which is great news if your primary goal in life is dying completely alone but very quickly. If you do not arrive at the thesis statement of your weekend anecdote within forty-five seconds, an entire generation of productivity influencers begins visibly twitching.
We have diagnosed the human tangent as a system defect. It is not an error; it is the entire software.
The Executive Summary of Your Soul
The prevailing theory of modern communication seems to be borrowed from high-frequency trading algorithms. Get the data packet across the wire with minimal packet loss, log the transaction, and sever the connection. If you tell someone about your trip to Lisbon, they do not want to hear about the tile shop owner who looked like your high school chemistry teacher. They want the top three restaurants, ranked by wait time, and whether the walking tour was worth twelve euros.
This is known in linguistic circles as eliminating "phatic communication," which is the fancy academic term for speech that conveys zero quantifiable data but establishes that neither of you is holding a concealed rock. Sociolinguists estimate that between 30% and 50% of everyday human chatter is entirely empty of functional data. It is weather complaints. It is verbal throat-clearing. It is the rhythmic, pointless noise primates make while picking burrs out of each other's fur.
Photo by Jose Manuel Espigares Garcia on Pexels
Naturally, the optimization cult looks at this 50% buffer and sees waste. Why spend eight minutes listening to someone explain why they had to replace their hedge trimmers in 2014 when you could simply read a bulleted list of their personality traits on Notion? It saves calendar space. It leaves more time to stare at spreadsheets about your REM cycles.
The High Cost of Knowing What You're Talking About
A direct line between point A and point B is useful for freight trains and appendectomies. It is catastrophic for human intimacy. When you strip the scenic detour out of an interaction, you strip out every accidental data point that actually makes a human being tolerable to be around.
Consider the mechanics of the classic suburban tangent:
- It begins with a completely mundane logistical problem, such as purchasing a replacement seal for a pressure cooker.
- It branches violently into a grievance against a hardware chain that went bankrupt in 1998.
- It detours into a mini-biography of a man named Dale who had a glass eye and three collies.
- It concludes, twenty-two minutes later, with no resolution regarding the pressure cooker.
During this performance, zero operational objectives were completed. Yet somehow, you now know that your companion harbors a secret, irrational terror of Sears, cares deeply about herding dogs, and trusts you enough to speak without an internal editor running a threat assessment. That is not inefficiency. That is an encryption key.
Efficiency is cheap to fake. Any sociopath with a LinkedIn account can nod rhythmically, maintain unblinking eye contact, and summarize your action items at minute nineteen of a twenty-minute sync. It takes genuine, unmonetizable devotion to sit through a story where the narrator forgets the protagonist's name three separate times and stops to wonder whether that diner was on Route 9 or Route 27.
The Pathology of the Scenic Route
Naturally, we have decided to medicalize this. If you cannot extract the payload of your thought in Twitter-length bites, the internet will happily inform you that you suffer from a conversational processing defect. Every pause is an attention lapse. Every associative leap is a cognitive error that could be ironed out with thirty milligrams of a stimulant and a Pomodoro timer.
We are actively training ourselves to talk like bad API documentation. Notice how people begin stories now: "To make a long story short..." No. Do not make it short. If I wanted the short version, I would check the weather app or read Wikipedia. I asked you how your weekend was because I am pretending to care about your inner life, and you are supposed to flatter me by pretending you have one.
When you enforce brevity, you guarantee that every conversation remains strictly transactional. You get my request, I get your output. We exchange our little units of social currency and scurry back to our noise-canceling headphones before anyone accidentally reveals a weird vulnerability or an embarrassing hobby. It is pristine, frictionless, and utterly sterilizing.
What This Actually Means
The obsession with conversational efficiency is not about saving time; it is about managing risk. A tangent is dangerous because it is unscripted. It forces you to drift into territory where you might say something unvetted, unpolished, or insufficiently impressive to the professional network.
When we eliminate the preamble, the meandering clause, and the pointless digression about a stray cat from three summers ago, we do not become better communicators. We just become worse bots. We are trading the clumsy, glorious texture of actual fellowship for the sterile comfort of a project management dashboard.
Next time someone traps you in the produce aisle to detail the exact theological dispute that caused their church choir to disband in 2003, do not glance at your watch. Stand there, examine the cantaloupes, and let them take the dirt road. It is the only part of the journey worth paying for.
Quick Answers
Isn't rambling disrespectful of people's busy schedules?
Only if you believe the highest form of human affection is an empty inbox. If someone cannot spare three minutes for a scenic sentence, you are not a friend to them; you are a calendar conflict.
Are all tangents good?
No. A corporate tangent designed to avoid accountability is an insult. A personal tangent driven by zero self-awareness and pure associative chaos is art.
Can't we just get the point first and expand later?
No, because once the point has been delivered, the conversation is dead. Nobody stays in the theater after the credits start rolling to watch the grips put away the cables.
