“My social skills are gone”, a Malaysian worker posted something online that stopped thousands of people mid-scroll.
Two months into their 9-5 job, they said, their social skills were gone. They had become quiet. Withdrawn. The kind of person who walks past colleagues without making eye contact and dreads small talk at the pantry. The office, they said, had made them into someone they barely recognised.
The post went viral. Thousands of Malaysians related to it instantly. Comments poured in from people who said the same thing had happened to them. And just like that, the 9-5 job was on trial again, this time not just for being exhausting, but for apparently draining people of their ability to be human around other humans.
I read that post and had one immediate thought.
Is this a Gen-Z problem? Or an office problem?
Let me explain.
The Office Was Where I Became Who I Am
I am a Gen-X. I entered the workforce in an era before smartphones, before Slack, before you could send a passive-aggressive email to avoid having a difficult conversation face to face. If you had a problem with a colleague, you walked over to their desk and sorted it out. If you disagreed with your manager, you said so in a meeting and dealt with the response in real time. If you were new and did not know anyone, you introduced yourself at the photocopier.
The office was not just where I worked. It was where I learned to communicate. To read a room. To manage up and manage across. To navigate conflict, build trust, give feedback, take criticism, and eventually lead teams of people with completely different personalities and working styles.
My social skills were not something I arrived at the office with fully formed. They were built there, over years, through hundreds of uncomfortable conversations and awkward situations and moments where I had to figure out how to handle things I had never encountered before.
The office did not destroy my social skills. It created them.
So What Has Changed?
Everything, frankly.
According to CNBC, a University of San Diego professor of business ethics put it plainly: Gen Z are digital natives who have always communicated online, so their interpersonal skills and soft skills have suffered as a result. They are extraordinarily capable with technology. But the muscle that gets developed through years of face-to-face interaction, through learning to read body language, hold eye contact, navigate silence, and handle conflict without the buffer of a screen, that muscle simply has not been trained the same way.
A Fortune study from March 2026 found a direct link between the decline in close relationships among Gen Z and their readiness for the workplace. Researcher Tami West found that skills developed in close personal relationships, things like negotiation, compromise, handling uncomfortable conversations, and managing social anxiety, directly predict how well someone handles those same situations at work. Gen Z, the research shows, is socialising less in person, attending fewer social gatherings, and spending more time communicating through screens. The downstream effect is a generation that arrives at their first job without the social foundation that previous generations built naturally through lived experience.
HR experts writing in 2025 noted that the soft skills gap does not always show up immediately. It is subtle. A team miscommunication that delays a project. A manager giving feedback only to be met with defensiveness. A remote employee going quiet during a critical moment. It is not a glaring failure. It is a slow erosion that compounds over time.
And then one day, a Gen-Z worker sits down and writes a post saying their social skills are gone. And thousands of people relate to it. Because it is not just one person. It is a pattern.
The Office Is Not the Problem. The Preparation Is.
Here is the thing I want Gen-Z readers to hear clearly. The office did not take your social skills. The office is trying to give them to you. But it can only work with what you bring in.
If you have spent the formative years of your life communicating primarily through text messages, TikTok comments, and voice notes, the office is going to feel jarring. The expectation that you make eye contact during meetings, engage in small talk with someone you barely know, push back on an idea in a room full of people, or navigate a tense situation without the ability to delete and retype your response, those things are going to feel harder than they should.
That discomfort is not the office destroying you. That is the office teaching you. And the lesson will only stick if you lean into it rather than retreat.
A survey of 2,000 young workers found that 85% of Gen-Z graduates believe social skills are essential for career advancement, yet the same generation consistently rates itself as underprepared in exactly those areas. They know the skills matter. They just have not had enough practice.
My Take
I say this with genuine respect for a generation that is navigating a genuinely difficult world. You are entering a workforce reshaped by a pandemic, disrupted by AI, and operating with economic pressures that my generation did not face at your age. I get it.
But here is my honest advisory. Do not outsource your social development to your phone. The meeting table, the water cooler conversation, the slightly awkward lunch with a colleague you do not know well yet. These are not inconveniences. They are training grounds.
I built my confidence, my leadership style, and frankly my entire professional identity through years of showing up, mingling, disagreeing, collaborating, failing, and trying again in the company of other people. None of that happened on a screen.
The worker who said their social skills were gone after two months of office life was not describing what the office did to them. They were describing what years of screen-first living looked like when it finally met a world that required something different.
The good news is that social skills are not fixed. They are built. And the office, for all its Monday morning meetings and awkward team lunches, is still one of the best places on earth to build them.
Show up. Talk to people. Be uncomfortable for a while. It gets better.
Kamarul Azwan (k.azwan@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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