The Social Muscle Atrophy
- 3 days ago
- 10 min read
Peter Boeckel is a designer, educator, and entrepreneur with 16+ years building innovation teams across Asia and the U.S., spanning MNCs and startups. He teaches design at IITs and universities in India and writes on the future of education and entrepreneurship. He advises universities and organizations on building stronger design capability.
The work was good. The product functioned. Yet, after two and a half months, the follow-up project, already in planning and under consideration, did not happen. Not because the deliverable disappointed, but because the human behind it did.
I have been thinking about this for a while. Not because the story itself is unusual, we all know a version of it, but because the timing matters. This particular failure did not happen in a vacuum. It happened at the exact moment when the technical barrier to building almost anything digital is dissolving. That barrier is not dissolving only in the digital world. I believe that almost anything produced or made is subject to this dissolution. Gradually at first, beginning in the digital and services world. But soon beyond, as hyperautomation will not stop where zeros and ones end.
A reminder: The mass experiment we already ran
The COVID-19 pandemic was, first and foremost, a tragedy. The loss of life, the isolation, the rupture of ordinary routines at a scale none of us had experienced before, none of that should be flattened into a management lesson. But when something of that magnitude forces a global behavioral shift simultaneously, it also produces data. The data, as it has come in, tells a complicated story.
Between 2020 and roughly 2022, hundreds of millions of people who had not done so before worked from home, in a state of permanence we had not seen before. What we learned was not simple. We learned that, for many people, the office was not necessary five days a week, and that questioning this was long overdue. We also learned that the office had a competitor it had never really faced, the home environment. In that competition, the office did not always perform well.
The open-plan layout, the interruptions, the performative presence, the commute as a daily tax, these had always been costs. What the pandemic did was make those costs visible by removing them. We discovered that offices are often not good enough environments for deep work. Granted, in some cases, the office performed better than the home, as not everyone was fortunate enough to have a space that could be transformed, even partially, into a functional workplace. The picture was never uniform. The honest summary is that the office, as it had been designed and used, was not justified at its previous scale or in its previous form. What a better form looks like is still being worked out.
But we also learned something that took longer to surface because its effects are delayed. The office, and any shared physical environment, a cafe, a co-working space, a third place if one can still be found, was doing something else entirely. Something that had nothing to do with desks or proximity to management. It was training a muscle, the social muscle. One, we did not notice we were training because we had never had reason to stop.
How atrophy works
The problem with muscular atrophy is that it is quiet. You do not feel the fiber breaking down. You feel it six months later, when something that was once effortless suddenly requires effort. When a flight of stairs leaves you winded.
Social atrophy is worse. Because the feedback loop is longer, and because the loss is not felt internally first. It is observed by others. The person whose social muscle has deteriorated is often the last to know. They notice, instead, that people seem unnecessarily difficult, that conversations feel more exhausting than they remember, that colleagues seem to take things personally. What they are not noticing is that they are the ones who changed.
The muscle in question is not charm or charisma. It is something more structural. It is the capacity to hold a disagreement without becoming brittle. To absorb a blunt comment without catastrophizing it. To sit in a room with someone who is frustrated and know how to let them land without making it worse. To read a face and adjust. To hear silence and understand what it means. These are not social niceties. They are operational skills. Like all skills, they weaken when not used.
What we called working from home was, in many cases, the systematic withdrawal of that training environment. Eight hours of Slack messages and video calls, where body language compresses to a thumbnail and tone flattens to text, do not maintain this muscle. It simply does not create the friction necessary to keep it functional.
A shifting threshold
None of this is quite new. The research on remote work and social isolation has been accumulating since 2021. What has changed is the context in which it now sits.
We are entering a period in which technical depth, the kind that once defined who could build things, who could offer services, who could enter certain professional circles, is becoming more broadly accessible. This is not the end of technical expertise. The threshold is simply moving. What once required years of specialized training to produce can now be produced by people with a strong conceptual grasp of what they want and the ability to direct the tools that build it. This threshold is constantly moving, as access to these tools broadens and as semi-autonomous and eventually fully autonomous systems evolve, the gap between having technical knowledge and being able to produce technical outcomes will continue to narrow.
This is not a problem, and treating it as one would be a mistake. It mirrors shifts we have seen before. A person can cook a remarkable meal over an open fire without understanding the chemistry of combustion. A professional driver does not need to know how to repair the engine. I use computers every day without any meaningful technical depth regarding how they are manufactured. Access to a capability and success through it do not require mastery of its underlying mechanics.
In the current wave, people with non-technical backgrounds are building functional products, automating workflows, and developing systems of genuine utility. The person offering a technical solution increasingly lacks a traditional technical biography.
What they have instead is a strong undercurrent of ideas, a facility with new tools, and the capacity to translate between what is needed and what can be built. For now, this also produces a kind of peer economy, where people with knowledge of AI offer services to those without. This too is familiar. When the internet arrived, website designers sold to businesses that had no idea what HTML was. That expertise became widely distributed over time, only to become invisible again as sophisticated content management systems required little to no code. The same is underway now, only faster.
As more people develop this kind of working fluency, the differentiation will shift. The question of who gets the project, who keeps the client, and who earns the follow-up work will depend less on who can technically execute and more on who is trustworthy in the process of doing so. Who communicates well under pressure. Who knows, without being asked, when to go slightly beyond what was specified, because it will matter to the relationship.
The atrophy, observed
I watched this play out over exactly two and a half months. A friend of mine, not a developer, not someone who codes, but a creative person, needed a system built. Something to organize a podcast workflow, transcripts, episode structuring, social media posts, and so on. An interface that could make the whole process faster and less manual than copy-pasting to and from ChatGPT.
A contractor was found who could do this, someone who had learned, through tools, instinct, and a designer's background, to think in systems and build functional digital products. The work started well. The early deliverables were solid. The contractor was easy to deal with in the beginning, responsive and clear.
Then something shifted. Not in the quality of the output. The system kept working. What deteriorated was the interaction. Conversations grew shorter, then reactive. Explanations that required a second pass began to produce defensiveness rather than clarity. A request for a minor change became an occasion for friction. The friction did not go away.
What I found most instructive was not the deterioration itself, but what my friend said repeatedly throughout, if this person would just do this one thing, or just stop behaving in that way, I would give them the follow-up project. The recovery was never technically complicated. It was not a matter of rebuilding a feature or adding beyond the scope.
It was a matter of holding a conversation. Of acknowledging a concern. Of coming back once with a response that communicated, I hear you, we are fine, let us continue.
There was also something more subtle at play. Someone with a trained social sense would have spotted, at several points across those two and a half months, opportunities to go slightly beyond what was asked. A proactive check-in at a moment when the client was clearly under pressure. A minor detail attended to without being prompted. An additional thought offered on the brief. These gestures do not require much. But they convert a transactional relationship into a trusted one, and the return on that investment is disproportionate. None of those opportunities were taken.
The clearest moment came near the end. My friend mentioned that the follow-up project, which had been in discussion, would not begin immediately but would come through in one to two months. It was not canceled. It was not given to someone else. It was delayed. That announcement, reasonable and unremarkable in any normal working relationship, was met with something close to a withdrawal. The contractor reacted as if a commitment had been broken and effectively signed out of the relationship at the exact moment when a measured response would have secured everything they had been working toward.
Diagnosis beyond behavior
Two and a half months is too long to explain away as a difficult week or a run of bad days. This was not two people building something together as equals, navigating the ordinary friction of a shared endeavor. It was a client and a contractor, a relationship with a clear structure and clear expectations on both sides.
What emerged over those months was something structural rather than personal. This person had worked for the better part of six to eight years, largely in isolation. Not in organisations where client and stakeholder management was a daily requirement. Not in rooms where disagreement needed navigating and friction was a normal part of the work. Alone, or near-alone, building things for people they communicated with largely asynchronously. The quality of the work was not the problem. The social muscle had simply not been trained enough.
The result was a professional acting quite unprofessional. Someone who could not hold a client relationship through periods of needed re-alignment. Could not re-explain without irritation. Could not smooth over a rough moment and return things to stable ground. Could not read the occasions where a small gesture would have changed the dynamic entirely. Could not do what, in any sustained working relationship, eventually becomes the whole game, make the other person feel that despite the complications, they are in capable and trustworthy hands.
In the economy we are moving toward, technical capability will become more broadly distributed. The contractor in this story is itself a version of that shift, someone who had developed genuine technical capability through tools and instinct, operating at a level that would not have been accessible without formal training a few years earlier. The gap between technical knowledge and technical output is narrowing for more people, and will continue to.
What does not narrow automatically is the capacity for human relationships under pressure. That one requires deliberate maintenance, and it requires an environment that actually trains it. Not a message thread. Not a call where the other person is a face in a box. Shared physical space, in real time, with real friction and real consequences.
The skill that won’t automate
The debate about returning to the office has mostly been framed around productivity. How many days, which tasks justify the commute, and how to measure output across locations. These are not unimportant questions, but they tend to miss the more significant one.
Three or four days a week in the kind of environment where one is required to hold a position, absorb a reaction, and navigate around another person is not primarily an output question. It is a maintenance question. Maintaining a capacity that, once lost, is not quickly rebuilt, and whose absence is unlikely to be noticed by the person who lost it until someone else already has.
This is not a defense of the five-day office. That model has earned its skepticism. But the question of where and how the social muscle gets trained is, I think, foremost an individual one. The world of work is changing in a specific direction. As the technical floor rises and more people can produce technically competent output, the differentiating variable shifts. It shifts toward the capacity to work with other people under pressure. To hold a disagreement without fracturing it. To navigate the friction that any real collaboration generates. That is not a soft skill in the dismissive sense of the term. It is a competitive one. Like any competitive skill, it atrophies without deliberate practice.
Organizations have a direct interest in this too, and not only because smooth working relationships are pleasant. A collective whose social muscle has weakened will struggle to innovate. Innovation is not a process of consensus. It requires debate, disagreement, discernment, and a genuine contest of ideas. People who cannot hold that kind of friction productively tend to avoid it. They smooth things over too quickly, defer rather than push back, or withdraw when the conversation becomes uncomfortable. The result is not harmony. It is a subtle collective incapacity that shows up most visibly in moments of crisis, during all-hands periods when the organization needs to move fast and stay aligned at the same time. These are precisely the moments that separate agile organizations from brittle ones. They are disproportionately decided by how well people can work together under pressure.
Seeking out the environments where this muscle is trained, whether that is an office, a co-working space, a cafe, or a third place with real social friction, is something every working person has a direct interest in. Not because an employer requires it, but because the alternative is a slow and largely invisible deterioration of the one capacity that will become more consequential, not less, as the technical floor continues to rise.
Read more from Peter Adam Boeckel
Peter Adam Boeckel, Designer, Futurist, Educator, Entrepreneur
Peter Boeckel is a designer, futurist, educator, and entrepreneur with 16+ years working across Europe, Asia, and the U.S., spanning global organizations, startups, and scale-ups. He teaches design at IITs and universities in India and advises universities on developing or repositioning design programs for the future. Peter writes about the intersection of design, education, and entrepreneurship and how new learning models can help us reach more stable and forward-thinking societies in the age of hyperautomation. He advises startups in the hardware space and works with organizations to build or reform design and innovation capabilities. He hosts Design Office Hours, exploring leadership and the realities of building products and teams every day.
