There's a category of decision you're probably making without registering it.
Choosing the supermarket with self-checkout. Booking online rather than phoning. Letting somebody else ask. Not going to the thing where you'd have to talk to people.
Each one is trivial and sensible. The aggregate is the actual cost of not being able to speak, and it appears nowhere.
The Routing Is Invisible Because It Works
That's the difficulty. Nothing fails. You get the shopping, the booking gets made, the evening is fine.
The cost sits entirely in the counterfactual — the exchange that didn't happen, the person you didn't end up talking to, the small relationship that never started. None of which shows up as a problem, because absences don't announce themselves.
So you can spend years steadily narrowing the range of situations you'll enter, and experience it as a series of small preferences rather than as a pattern.
What It Compounds Into
Over a year, several hundred avoided exchanges. Over a few years, a life in that place noticeably smaller than the one available.
Fewer casual acquaintances. Less information about what's happening locally. A narrower set of places you're comfortable in. And progressively less practice, which holds the whole thing in position.
Nobody would choose that arrangement deliberately. It assembles itself out of individually reasonable decisions.
The Threshold Is Low
Here's the practical part. The routed-around situations are almost entirely transactional, and transactional exchanges run on a very short list.
Order, ask, buy, confirm, thank, leave. Thirty or so exchanges covers essentially all of it, and it's the same thirty everywhere.
Which means the aggregate cost above is being paid for the lack of a genuinely small amount of automatic language. Not fluency. Thirty phrases arriving in under a second.
Worth Counting Once
Over the next week, notice each time you take the option that avoids speaking. Don't change anything — just count.
The number is usually larger than people expect, and it makes the abstract cost concrete in a way no argument does.
About Outputly
Outputly's earliest songs are the transactional exchanges — order, ask, buy, confirm. The short list that most of the routing exists to avoid.