Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn vos Savant

Vos Savant’s line is a neat reversal of the Silicon Valley fairy tale: more channels don’t equal more clarity. The sentence starts with a concession to the techno-optimists - “fabulous communication ability” - then pivots on a blunt “but,” flattening the hype into a familiar mess. It’s not an anti-tech screed; it’s a diagnosis of coordination failure. We didn’t lose the power to communicate. We lost the shared map that makes communication cohere.

The subtext is about fragmentation masquerading as connectivity. Email, IM, and cell phones don’t just speed up messages; they splinter attention and privatize context. Each person “live[s] and work[s] in our own little worlds,” a phrase that sounds cozy until you notice the isolation baked into it. “Little” signals both comfort and small-mindedness: personal systems, private inboxes, individualized notification regimes. Everyone becomes their own switchboard operator, triaging streams instead of building common understanding.

Context matters here: coming from a public intellectual known for punchy, commonsense logic, the quote targets a late-20th/early-21st-century shift where workplaces adopted digital tools faster than they developed norms for using them. The result is “totally disorganized” not because the tools fail, but because they succeed at letting everyone communicate on their own terms. Vos Savant is pointing at the hidden cost of convenience: when every interaction can happen instantly, nothing forces agreement on priorities, archives, decision paths, or even where the “real” conversation lives. Communication becomes abundant, and meaning becomes scarce.