A Ghost of a Chance

I.

A couple of years after he published Moby Dick, Herman Melville wrote the lesser known short story, Bartleby, The Scrivener. While the former detailed an epic quest for an elusive foe, the latter is a succinct account of a disappearing act. It may also be the first record of ghosting in the workplace.

Bartleby was a Wall Street copyist who one day simply stopped responding. Requests from his employer, who is the story’s narrator, were met with the simple reply, “I would prefer not to.” Eventually he stopped responding at all, choosing instead to stare out the window at a brick wall. His employer, unable to elicit a response, eventually tries to ghost the ghoster by moving his office down the street.

We tend to think of ghosting as a disease of the smartphone age; born of Tinder, nurtured by LinkedIn. But Bartleby reminds us the impulse is older than the inbox. What is new is the scale provided by technology, the relative ease with which one can now ghost someone else, and the creeping normalization of silence as a professional default.

This was the conversation I had a few weeks ago when a former student and I met over Zoom to discuss her career pursuit. A recent graduate of our MBA program, she was still in the hunt for a job. She’s a strong candidate—smart, thoughtful, and unstoppable. Nevertheless, she was beginning to feel marooned. Since graduating, she completed over 300 interviews. Many progressed to second and third rounds. One required eleven rounds. What really bothered her was that, in many cases, the process ended unceremoniously with complete silence.

She wanted to know what she should do when recruiters and hiring managers ghost her. They don’t answer their phones or respond to emails. She asked, “what am I doing wrong and what should I do next?”

She wasn’t doing anything wrong. If anything, she was doing everything right. Unlike many of her peers, she was getting interviews. I seriously doubted that the silence was due to her qualifications or her effort.

This is the worst hiring environment for recent college graduates that I’ve seen since I pivoted to teaching. Up until recently, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates sat consistently below the rate for the rest of the working population. Around 2015, the two lines started converging. After COVID, a gap opened that disfavored recent grads, and it has increased every year since.

Matters have been made worse by AI’s disruption of knowledge work, the reshuffling of the global economic order under new tariffs, and financial markets that twitch at the price of oil and conflict in the Middle East, all while money managers cope with this eerie deja vu feeling that private credit is about to have a mortgage-backed securities moment. The prevailing corporate wisdom is Don’t hire. Don’t fire.

My student knew all this. The headlines assault us every day with these facts. But there’s something more—something I didn’t tell her, because I was a little ashamed. I was experiencing the same pain, and feeling the same sense of helplessness.

2025 was the leanest year I’ve ever experienced in my private consulting practice. Budgets were suspended by clients in an endless “wait and see” pause. I understood this, but I didn’t understand the long bouts of silence. The majority of my practice revolves around clients who have worked with me for decades. The histories are so intertwined that I consider many of them dear friends. Yet last year I found that even my most casual, friendly efforts at outreach went unanswered.

In the old days, it was simple. You picked up the phone. You’d time it right and catch them before voicemail. You’d have a conversation and gradually opportunities surfaced. But now no one answers their phone and it is just too easy to ignore an email.

I came close to throwing in the towel last year. I wondered whether my best days as a strategist and researcher were behind me, and whether the silence meant the universe was trying to tell me something I wasn’t ready to hear.

Then, a fourth quarter deluge of projects arrived, some from the very clients I thought had abandoned me. The lights came back on but the darkness while they were out was unsettling. Sitting across from me on that Zoom, I recognized my own fears and frustrations in my student’s face. She and I had seen the same specter in the void. We were both being haunted and neither of us understood why.

II.

The young man shifting in his chair had been settling into an online conversation with a new friend when the “spinning wheel of death” appeared. The platform facilitating his conversation was experiencing technical difficulties. He waited as patiently as he could, but his anxiety was increasing. He met his chat partner a few minutes before. Both were participants in a research project. They’d been discussing their favorite movies when the platform glitched. Now, as minutes passed without interaction, he wondered what the person on the other end was thinking. Were they seeing the same error message? Did they know that he couldn’t respond, or did they think he’d dropped off out of disinterest?

What he didn’t know was that this wasn’t a glitch. It was all part of the study—the brainchild of YeJin Park Roberts, a PhD candidate in Management and Organization at the NYU Stern School of Business.

Park studies play and how it influences work relationships. She proposes that play can “rehumanize” aspects of work that lead to greater equity and flourishing business performance. Her work has found that play leads to connection and feelings of inclusion. She is curious about what happens when people are brought together, but this study was focused on an alternate question: what happens when they disappear?

She and her collaborator, Nadav Klein, published findings from this study in a 2024 paper titled, “Ghosting: Social rejection without explanation, but not without care,” in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. They staged several experiments to understand ghosting.

A few minutes after our stressed out chat participant encountered technical difficulties, the research team provided him with some options. If he wanted to leave, the team would let him keep the money promised to him for his participation, even though the experiment couldn’t be completed (or so he thought). They even offered to pay him a slight bonus as consideration for his troubles. But there was a twist. The researchers would let him apply the bonus to a separate text channel on the platform that would allow him to send an explanation to his new acquaintance. Alternatively, he could wait 20-30 minutes for the technical difficulty to resolve, with no guarantee that his partner would still be on the other end when it had.

The researchers gave him an easy out. It was a technical difficulty and not his fault at all. He could keep the money. Yet 44% of the time, people in his position elected to pay money not to ghost a stranger they’d known for only about 3 minutes.

While it may surprise you to imagine someone forfeiting a payday to convince a complete stranger they hadn’t ghosted them, the other side of the coin is equally revealing. The ghosted participant on the other end of the line assumed the worst, and significantly underestimated the intentions and feelings of the ghoster. This pattern repeated across nearly every method Park and Klein explored.

They interviewed people to recall actual ghosting experiences from their past. Most of these experiences occurred in relationships that lasted for at least five years. But what’s remarkable is the asymmetry of perceptions between the parties. The person left in the silence dramatically underestimated how much the person who had gone quiet actually cared about them. Ghostees predicted the ghoster cared about their wellbeing at roughly a two on a seven-point scale. The ghoster reported their actual care closer to a four. This repeated consistently across every experiment.

In more than a third of their accounts, ghosters said that they didn’t want to hurt the ghosted person. They didn’t want them to feel rejected. Meanwhile, the ghosted participants believed those same motives to be true of the people who had ghosted them less than fifteen percent of the time. To the ghostee, silence is proof that they don’t matter much. Yet the data suggests a new question. What if the silence isn’t a signal they wish you would disappear? What if they ghosted you because they value you much more than you believed?

III.

Employers appear to be more inclined to ghost than they were in the past. A recent study by Criteria Corp, a provider of employee testing and video interviewing tools that also publishes an annual Candidate Experience Report, found that almost half of candidates claim they were ghosted by employers. That’s up from 38% the year before.

If this pattern continues, more than half of job seekers will soon be left in a pool of ambiguity to understand why they didn’t get the job. If there’s one rule we can rely upon in such a setting, it is that all ambiguous information will be interpreted negatively. Absent any feedback, ghosted folks assume the worst. When we zoom out to the bigger picture of American culture and social life, ghosting contributes to a rapidly eroding sense of trust and fair play.

The General Social Survey has asked Americans a series of the same questions about each other since 1972. One of those questions is simply, “Can most people be trusted?” Fifty years ago, 46% of Americans said yes. Today, only 24% think so. A second question asked, “do you think most people try to be fair?” Again, half a century ago 59% said yes. Today, it’s 42%.

These are the operating assumptions people carry into every unanswered email, every ignored follow-up, every silence that stretches past the point of reasonable explanation. Ghosting did not create this mistrust or skepticism. Perhaps it grew out of it.

It also doesn’t help that we are socializing a lot less. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has tracked how Americans spend their time since 2003. Back then, 38% of Americans socialized on an average day. When that metric was last measured, in 2024, the percentage was 29%. Americans spend 158 fewer hours a year in face-to-face social contact than they did two decades ago. The pandemic certainly accelerated the decline, but the trendline was declining before we locked down.

Did we stop socializing because we grew increasingly convinced people are unfair and not to be trusted, or did we stop trusting and believing in fairness because we withdrew from social activities? I don’t know. That’s above my pay-grade. But it does seem a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it doesn’t change the fact that a lot of folks are feeling left behind.

I complained about this several months ago over lunch with a friend who was once my client. She’s a New Yorker and she possesses that absolutely wonderful filterless quality that never leaves you guessing what she really thinks. After ranting about being recently ghosted by a long-term client, I fumed that I was a big boy and could handle a “no.” What I couldn’t stand was silence.

She looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Larry, have you checked the news? The world is a dumpster fire.” I argued that was precisely why the decent thing to do was to reply to my email. Be decent! Do the right thing. To this she replied, “you have no idea what the person on the other end of the line is going through at this moment. We’re all just trying to get through it. You may not be the most important thing on that person’s plate right now.”

I’d been so caught up in my own frustration and feelings of abandonment that it hadn’t occurred to me that the perpetrator might be in a worse mental state than I was. The data supports this proposition.

The American Psychological Association surveyed more than 3,000 adults in the summer of 2025 and found that 69% had needed more emotional support over the past year than they received. That figure has climbed every year since 2023. Nearly seven in ten employed adults identified work as a significant source of personal stress, the highest reading since the first months of COVID.

The saddest dimension of their data are all the statistics that point to a lot of us feeling disconnected. 54% say they feel isolated from others. Half say they feel left out. Is it any wonder that we believe the worst when the person on the other end of the line disappears? For all we know, they are indeed experiencing the worst.

V.

Christmas Eve, 1914 on The Western Front. The war is five months old and already nothing like anyone had promised or imagined. The trenches run for four hundred miles. The mud feels permanent. The dead are everywhere.

Then someone lights a candle.

A German soldier places a small tree on the edge of his trench and sets a candle on the branches. Another soldier joins him. Then another. The British watch from across no man’s land as the German line suddenly begins to glow. Someone sings Stille Nacht. And then a voice on the British side answers. Then more voices. Then someone climbs out of a trench without a weapon and walks into the frozen ground between the lines.

By morning they were exchanging cigarettes and showing each other photographs of their families. Rifleman Walkington described the German line as looking like an illuminated fête. A German soldier told his British counterpart, “we all have wives and children. We’re just the same kind of men as you are.”

Meanwhile, the generals were horrified. It was strictly against the rules. It was dangerous. And it changed nothing structurally. They were right. The war resumed on December 26th and did not end for four more years.

And yet.

No one ordered the tree, the candles, or the singing. No one waited for conditions to be perfect. No one knew if the gesture would be answered before they made it. One person decided the silence had gone on long enough and did the only thing available to them. They made themselves visible and hoped for the best.

Digital communication has removed the circuit breakers that used to make disappearing harder. You cannot ignore someone’s eye contact. You cannot pretend you didn’t hear a voice in the same room. But you can leave an email unread for a month and tell yourself you’ll get to it. The friction that once forced human contact has been engineered away, and we are lonelier for it.

The imperfect gesture is the candle on the trench line. It takes about thirty seconds. A quick email reply. I haven’t forgotten you. Things have been complicated. I’ll be in touch properly soon. It doesn’t resolve everything. It doesn’t have to. It just has to be sent.

My student on that Zoom had done nothing wrong. The silence was never a verdict on her worth. It was a weather system she got caught in; a structural and accelerating weather system that was indifferent to her qualifications or her effort. I told her to keep going, and I know she will because she has grit. I wish I could advise her on how to break the pattern. The best advice I gave was to not give up and to keep nudging those contacts. Whenever she does that, she might be lighting a candle. Her persistence and her nudges might give people on the other end of the silence permission to answer.

Bartleby died from self-starvation, staring at a wall in the Tombs. Silence killed him. His employer was left holding a grief he couldn’t name. He began feeling wronged, then guilty, then simply bereft. He offered food, lodging, and sympathy, all of which were unanswered. Melville summed up the situation in two grief-stricken sentences. “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”

My student is not Bartleby. Neither, I think, are the people who have gone quiet on her. The research says they care more than she knows, and I believe that. I believe that about my clients, too. Both of us have to light candles anyway. It won’t guarantee anything, but the alternative—two people sitting in separate silences, each convinced there is something wrong with themselves rather than the situation—is a story that ends in the Tombs.