Ordering a Maid, Avoiding a Neighbor: The Quiet Death of Social Capital
Who the hell wants a maid on demand via an app anyway?
I was ranting to a friend of mine on how ridiculous I find that apps that offer maid-as-as-service (MaaS?) are finding traction, how pitiable an innovation this is and how we’ve become so lazy that we can’t even wash out utensils or clean our house by ourself for a few days when the maid is on a leave.
I expected him to agree with this sentiment, but this was his response -
My initial reaction was to scoff at it, but I tried thinking from his point of view and didn’t want to respond to it reactively. It’s been weeks now, and I still can’t fully digest it. Yes, there is some utility that an app like this may bring in specific cases, but how did we survive without these apps for so many years? We either did the work ourselves OR asked around for a temporary maid in the worst case.
So what has changed? I think this is a combination of two lifestyle changes -
We’ve become lazier and hooked to convenience, especially in India
We’ve become more asocial and find making unsolicited conversation with people to be a burden, a nuisance, or even a headache
More on these later.
Trying to be a wolf around sheep
My wife and I had to visit my father-in-law’s friend, who was on a visit to Bangalore to meet their son in daughter-in-law, to collect a parcel that my father-in-law had sent.
Despite the location being just a 5-minute drive away, I felt some resistance to go meet someone, just to collect a parcel, but did it in good faith anyway.
Once we were there, we met the son and his wife and tried making conversation with the 4 of them. The parents tried their bit to bring up topics to make conversation, but then beyond a point, there are only so many topics that you could talk about, so we fell into these tense moments of awkward silence. The son and his wife barely spoke all this time.
I believe in the concept of being a “wolf” as far as possible, i.e.- be smart and make conversation, make the other people (the “sheep” talk and feel good and develop some rapport.
I tried probing the son about his job and found out that he was a senior employee at a well-known content startup and tried steering the conversation towards exactly that - the startup world, his flat, content, HSR layout etc.
However, beyond a few replies and smiles, he barely spoke and more importantly, didn’t ask me or my wife about our jobs or flat or anything of that sort. It felt like they couldn’t wait end for this awkward charade of camaraderie and for us to leave. Let me give him the benefit of doubt and accept that he was possibly an introvert.
My father often travelled by train for his business purchasing purposes. While he was no extrovert by any means, he said that he could become friends with “half the coach” sometimes (an exaggeration, of course, but you get the point).
My broader point of these two contrasting experiences is that the times have changed so much. The son and his wife, whom we had visited could have become potential friends as well, given that we had common themes running across but unlike my father, they didn’t even try to make conversation, if not to make “friends”, but at least to be social and polite.
What had led us to become like this?
Social media has made us less social - The number one obvious reason is social media and how we are slaves to algorithm-driven-dopamine pleasure and prefer participating in a group chat where you may not know 95% of the people but yet feel like “family” to you, rather than actually talk to people around you.
At work, I keep telling one of my team members, as a serious feedback, that that team member HAS to go be more sociable, not just to kill time, but also as a tool to understand things better, be visible, learn how to speak to different audiences, develop trust and rapport or even sport opportunities for value addition. These are all critical stepping stones in professional development. While that team member has made progress, it is limited to say the least and it shows in her creativity at work and visibility in a major manner as well.My broader point is that social media has made us less social - a fact that most of you would be very much aware about.
Competition in the world- Another major reason behind the breakdown of trust is that the modern world is increasingly more competitive and the way to stay ahead in life is to constantly try to be a step ahead of the other (similar to how things work in traffic in Indian cities). This leads to a breakdown in trust levels as well where you would not trust someone making unsolicited conversation with you
Breakdown in trust and polarization - breakdown of trust that has been exacerbated due to political polarization (caste, language, religion, region etc) - called "erosion of social capital". When you meet people in community areas like common spaces like parks, courtyards, social events, etc, there is a development of this social capital. Lonely people create a mob/tribal mentality due to their insecurity and lack of identity - in this fast-moving world, these people don't feel seen so an association with extreme mobs and jingoism makes them feel seen. Politicians take advantage of this this ends up in a vicious cycle of further breakdown of trust
Everything is so convenient now, we don’t borrow from neighbours anymore- we don’t visit grocery stores as much anymore, we don’t want to buy fresh vegetables by touch and feel, we want doorstep service for everything and of course, we want to “order” maids on demand.
The convenience economy is messing up our inner wiring of being social beings. We don’t bother asking our neighbours for curd or for some missing masala powder or if their maid can cover our flat for a few days - we simply order all of this.
ChatGPT and AI will make this even worse.
If social media made us more asocial, and if Google made us believe that all information is at your fingertips, and if e-commerce made us want to order almost anything with just a few clicks, I think ChatGPT is only going to make this tilt towards what I “destructive self-sufficiency” even worse.
ChatGPT and Gemini is already putting a dent in the written content economy - who will visit your page or article or even Wikipedia when ChatGPT gives you a customized answer.
ChatGPT is like a friend now, instead of asking a friend for his itinerary for his Eurotrip and the difficulties he faced while booking a Schengen Visa, you can simply ask ChatGPT for all this (it’s a mother of coincidence that someone I know well just pinged me asking for this question)
Instead of meeting a friend and having a critical debate on some hot topic (why even bother to text that person on WhatsApp anymore), why don’t you just debate it with your friendly neighbourhood LLM instead?
We will use agentic AI to get many of our tasks done rather than get our hands dirty and do it ourselves.
Our ability to frame questions and respond to counter thoughts will diminish and ability to frame precise and detailed prompts to ChatGPT will become more important.
A bold prediction?
Am I sounding too dramatic in this article? Possibly, but I hope I’m able to convey how I feel about us becoming more cocooned because of social media, the convenience economy, and now ChatGPT and hence increasingly asocial.
I am struggling to take sides on the “Will AI be good for humanity?” debate and that’s for another time (it would definitely bring back more respect for physical labour and core engineering)
However, one bold prediction that I would like to make is that as the AI train derails some of chunks of our jobs, I think that a “people person” will stand out and do better in this brave new world. Your ability to network, connect, argue, convince, and think deeply - will all make you stand out even more.
To my friend who finds “ordering” on Snabbit to be helpful to society and something that solves a specific problem, here is my response.
I’m happy to meet you over tea or dosa and debate this further.
Excellent article as always, Pratik. You’ve painted the issue vividly, though you may have stretched one experience into a broader generalization.
Take me, for example. I read every one of your posts, not because your Substack is unique (it's just one of many platforms with many contributors who share their perspectives). Still, I read them because of the social capital we’ve built together, however small. That connection matters more to me than the medium.
I’ve worked from home for five years. Back in Kerala, I attended every function and gathering—it was effortless to nurture ties. But once you migrate, building social capital requires deliberate effort. When you know yourself, you may move again for career aspirations and naturally prioritize where to invest that effort. The need for connection doesn’t go away; how we approach it changes.
This is why I believe that in the AI era, curation of content and knowledge will become the real currency. Social capital will always be an inherent human need, but with limited time and energy, we all choose where to invest it. Some people thrive on constant connection, while others may lack energy. Perhaps the people you met happened to be in that second camp.
Either way, your reflections make us pause and think about these trade-offs. Keep writing and shining.
While I am a big Snabbit user, I agree about how social media and the profileration of qcomm apps have dented social capital, and negated the need for even simple conversation with neighbours