A great friend once reminded me how important it is to actually speak to people, over the phone, in person, or face-to-face and I think we have slowly lost the art of doing that.

We look up the information online. We schedule the meeting through a link. We send the quick message. We optimize the interaction.

And in all that efficiency, we miss the valuable touchpoints that happen when a conversation is allowed to wander.

Those are the moments when you learn someone's children's names, what their husband does for work, what they are cooking for dinner tonight, or what has been occupying their mind lately. None of that information may be relevant to the reason you originally called, but when we genuinely value those interactions, we gain something data could never fully relay to us.

We build trust, develop bonds, and we begin to care.

We have become so accustomed to efficiency that we sometimes forget that human relationships were never designed to be efficient.

Some of the healthiest relationships are built through the casual conversation that intentionally does not GET TO THE POINT.

Growing up in the South, that was normal.

You asked people how they were and actually waited for the answer. You invited people into your home without needing a reason. There were frozen meals ready to defrost for unexpected company, and kitchens were meant for gathering, talking, and taste-testing the cake batter before it made it into the oven.

Hospitality wasn't a strategy. It was part of how you moved through life.

When we lose that kind of personal touch, I think we also lose some of the stake we have in one another.

When you know someone's children's names, their favorite meal, what they drink, what they are worried about, or what they are celebrating, they stop being another contact, customer, neighbor, or person passing through your day.

You know them.

And the more we know people, the more likely we are to care about them.

Since moving to the Seattle area, I have felt the contrast.

Sometimes it feels like we are ready for the transaction but tempted to skip the greeting. We can schedule the meeting, exchange the information, accomplish the task, and move on without ever really learning much about the person sitting across from us.

Maybe that is efficient, but humans were never meant to operate like express checkout lanes.

We want the downtime and we want to linger. We want to tell stories that have absolutely nothing to do with the agenda. We want to be remembered. We want to belong.

So my encouragement to Seattle and Washington in general is simple:

Build a front porch.

Not necessarily a literal one.

Build a delightfully unproductive place where people are allowed to linger, where nobody is calculating the ROI of the conversation, where someone can stay ten minutes longer than planned, and where asking "How are you?" is not simply the opening line before getting down to business.

Your front porch might be a dinner table, a coffee shop, a brewery, a walking group, or two chairs pulled together because someone looked like they needed company.

Maybe the answer to the Seattle Freeze isn't another networking strategy.

Maybe we just need more front porches.