The Human Factor — Why Mom's Words Ring True

In the age of social media, real connections matter more than ever.

We’ve never had more ways to connect, yet fewer reasons to show up.

As we approach Mother’s Day here in the U.S., I find myself thinking about my mother, and the quiet wisdom she carried so naturally that I probably underestimated it at times.

She was born Mary Monahan and raised in an Irish-American family in Brooklyn, the youngest of three girls. When she spoke about her parents and her sisters, it was with a kind of reverence that made their lives feel almost mythic. Her father worked for the phone company, her mother a homemaker.

Summers were spent at a small cottage in Patchogue, Long Island, until her father’s illness forced the family to sell it. The beach never really left her, though, from the Rockaways to Jones Beach, and later with us as kids on Long Island, it remained a backdrop for connection, laughter, and memory.

But what defined her life wasn’t where she went. It was who she stayed connected to.

From childhood friends to “the kids from college,” from Lynbrook neighbors she hadn’t lived near in years, to the friendships she built in Huntington over decades, she carried people with her. Not casually. Intentionally. She remembered birthdays. She made the calls. She showed up.

And when she could no longer get out as easily, those phone calls became her lifeline. She didn’t just value them she depended on them, and she let you know how much they meant.

My mother didn’t need a study to understand something we’re only now proving with data: relationships are not maintained through convenience, they’re built through presence.

The Illusion of Connection

Social media gives us the feeling of being connected.

But it quietly removes the very friction that builds real relationships. Visiting becomes texting. Calling becomes liking. Gathering becomes scrolling. It’s never been easier to reach someone, and never been easier to avoid the effort that real connection requires.

The data is catching up to what many of us already feel. Even as we “interact” more frequently, something essential is missing. Because connection without presence doesn’t fully register.

What We Lost (Without Realizing It)

I grew up in a loud, big extended family. Thanksgiving at our house wasn’t an event, it was an experience. Conversations overlapped. Laughter carried from room to room. No one needed a calendar invite to stop by. You just showed up.

That was normal. Long, unstructured conversations. Dropping in unannounced. Time that wasn’t optimized or scheduled, but lived.

Today, it sounds almost foreign. “We should catch up” becomes a text that never turns into a call. Birthdays become a post, a comment, an emoji. We stay updated on each other’s lives without actually being part of them.

We didn’t decide to lose this. It just slowly faded as convenience took over. And the loss is no longer just a feeling, it’s something you can measure.

Since 2003, Americans aged 15 to 25 have lost about 26 minutes a day of in-person time with friends, roughly 158 hours a year.

Time spent attending or hosting parties has fallen about 70% in that age group. Across the population, face-to-face socializing has dropped roughly 20% in two decades, and almost 50% among teens. [^1]

A whole generation is showing up to fewer rooms.

She Didn’t Understand Social Media

Why would you post something on a screen, she’d wonder, when you could just call?

It’s easy to dismiss the question as generational. It isn’t. It’s the question the data has been quietly answering for fifteen years.

What the Numbers Show

Up to 95% of American teenagers use social media. Nearly two-thirds use it every day, and roughly one in three say they’re on it “almost constantly.” The average teen now spends about three and a half hours a day on social platforms, a number that’s important because of what crosses it. [^2]

At more than three hours a day, the risk of mental-health problems in adolescents roughly doubles. [^2]

Major depression among U.S. adolescents nearly doubled between 2010 and 2020, a rise that began in the exact years smartphones and social media became woven into daily life. The same pattern shows up in the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. [^3]

A dose-response meta-analysis found that for each additional hour of daily social-media use, the risk of depression rises about 13%, with a stronger effect for adolescent girls. [^4] And 46% of teens 13-17 say social media makes them feel worse about their bodies. [^2]

Loneliness has followed the same arc.

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General formally declared loneliness a public-health epidemic, noting its physical toll is comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, with elevated risk of heart disease, stroke, and dementia. [^5]

About 73% of 16- to 24-year-olds say they struggle with loneliness, and Gen Z is now the loneliest generation in America, surpassing seniors.

As of 2025, 57% of Americans report feeling lonely. [^6]

We have given young people more ways to be reached than any generation in history. They are reporting back, in numbers, that they have never felt further away.

She Didn’t Collect Connections — She Cultivated Them

My mother treated relationships as gifts. Not something to maintain. Something to live inside of.

She was generous with her time, not just with her children, but with her grandchildren, making each one feel like they had their own unique relationship with her.

She stayed close to friends across decades and distance. She and my father built a 54-year marriage full of joy, travel, and resilience, strong enough to endure life’s hardest moments.

And through it all, she repeated a simple truth:

Cherish the relationships and memories you have. Be thankful for them.

It wasn’t a slogan. It was how she lived.

The Moment It Became Real

After my mother passed three years ago, I had the responsibility of calling her friends and family to share the news.

I knew those relationships mattered to her. I had seen the calls, heard the stories. But it wasn’t until I made those calls that I understood what they meant on the other side.

You could feel it in their voices.

This wasn’t just the loss of a friend. It was the loss of a shared history. A presence that had been part of their lives for decades.

Part of their life had passed too.

I’m not sure you can feel any of that in a social media post.

The Cost of Replacing Presence

We didn’t stop being social. We just changed the definition of it.

I see it in my own life. I work remotely most of the time. It’s convenient. It’s functional. And at times, it’s isolating.

There’s something about being in the same room with people, the energy, the spontaneity, the unspoken connection, that doesn’t translate through a screen. It can’t. Empathy needs proximity.

Social media and remote work are here to stay. But I don’t believe this is the end of in-person connection. I think it’s the beginning of its return.

Because eventually, people feel what’s missing, and the data, finally, is catching up to that feeling.

The Human Factor

This Mother’s Day, I’m not just thinking about what my mother gave me. I’m thinking about what she understood before the rest of us forgot.

That relationships are not built in feeds. They’re built in rooms. Around tables. In conversations that don’t have a timer. In moments you can’t scroll past.

The algorithm rewards attention. Life rewards presence.

My mother knew that.

And in a world that keeps moving faster, more digital, more efficient, her words ring truer than ever.

Happy Mother’s Day.

---

[^1]: American Time Use Survey data, summarized in Derek Thompson, “The Death of Partying in the U.S.A. — and Why It Matters” and related coverage. See also The Hill, “Teens are spending less time than ever with friends.”

[^2]: U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory, Social Media and Youth Mental Health (2023).

[^3]: Twenge, J.M. et al., “Increases in Depression, Self-Harm, and Suicide Among U.S. Adolescents After 2012 and Links to Technology Use” (2022); Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation and Senate testimony.

[^4]: “Time Spent on Social Media and Risk of Depression in Adolescents: A Dose-Response Meta-Analysis,” 2022.

[^5]: U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation (2023).

[^6]: Meta-Gallup global loneliness survey (2024); Cigna, Loneliness in America 2025.