I am really bad at texting people back. In my old life, pre 2020, I wasn’t particularly great at it—and I certainly didn’t enjoy it as a form of communication—but I was able to keep on top of it through brute force.
These days, brute force is no longer a workable strategy in my life, and so I’ve just slid into negligence on this issue. I should say to my friends reading this: my slow responses (and occasional lack thereof) have little bearing on how I feel about you, the person sending the message. And if I’m trying to make an actual plan with someone, I can usually manage a timely response. I may be reclusive these days, but I try not to be flaky as well.
Usually, when you click on articles about “why you’re so bad at texting people back” you are framed as the problem. Ask a therapist why you’re so socially avoidant! Reevaluate your friendships and obligations because maybe you’re burned out! Set aside one hour a day to answer all your texts! (That last one doesn’t work by the way; it just results in more text messages.)
Rarely is the problem stated plainly: It is completely unreasonable—and in evolutionary terms, insane—to expect a human to be available and responsive to hundreds, if not thousands of people, across multiple platforms, in every time zone, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We should’ve never been put in this position! And yet we cannot opt out of it without seeming antisocial, offending people, or made to feel the problem lies in our inability to be more efficient. What bewilders me is that anyone does manage to respond to all their messages most of the time.
I felt so seen by this great piece in Wired about the dire need to reprise the “away message” a la AOL Instant Messenger. Nothing says “I was 15 in 2005” more than posting “My dad needs to use the computer” to let your friends know they shouldn’t try to message you on the family PC for a while. For what feels like forever, I have longed for an app that would allow me to put an away message across all the apps on my phone for a set amount of time, basically saying: “Don’t expect a reply from me for a while. My brain isn’t here.”
This paragraph from the Wired piece really struck me:
Old-fashioned phone calls used to, and sometimes still do, start with “Hey, you free?” Justin Santamaria, a former lead Apple engineer who helped launch Apple iMessage, points out. “You were going to tell me if you could talk before we started the conversation.” There’s a version of this today—someone might preface their message with “Not urgent, respond when you can,” for example—but for the most part, we just send the text message without consideration, Santamaria says. Interruption is the default.
What if you don’t want interruption as the default? I’ve realized the main reason I hate texting people back is because it interferes with my degree of presence. All the little micro-diversions each hour add up, and ask me to look away from what I’m thinking about or doing, even (or especially) if what I’m doing is not much at all.
Unlike email, which I resent far less, I can’t pick and choose when I’m ready to have my attention diverted elsewhere. While social media DMs are easy to turn off or ignore, if you mute or ignore WhatsApp and iMessage, you’ll miss the few urgent, time-sensitive messages you actually need to see. I speak from experience when I say this will really irritate your partner waiting for an answer from you while he’s at the grocery store.
Taking this thought process a little farther, the list of things in modern life that might fall under the category of “the problem is the expectation, not you” is sort of endless. We are so used to adapting to the expectations foisted upon us, that we don’t consider challenging or opting out of the ask itself. We just try to bend ourselves into weirder and weirder shapes. Our primate brains, unsurprisingly, can’t take it.
While our own individual resistance has its limits, I believe there is much we can opt out of if our goal is simply to live some version of a quiet, meaningful life. It’s worth taking an inventory of your life’s pain points to see what things you might be able to just unsubscribe from. Can you stop worrying about your child’s higher education prospects before they can even read properly? Can you admit you don’t really care about the concept of a “career”? Can you just make peace with your inability to exercise in any structured or aspirational way, and instead make a commitment to simply move more? Can you simply make fewer plans?
The goal, I think, is to create a version of daily life that more closely resembles what our brains and cells and skeletons and spirits were designed for, rather than one that our minds resent and bodies rebel against.
I see this dynamic play out a lot in the truly dystopian world of parenting advice/content/influencers online. Literally the moment you’re pregnant, the algorithm starts assaulting you with this stuff. At the core of it all, I detect the intense anxiety of people trying to prepare their kid to succeed in a culture that is full of unreasonable, maladaptive, and even inhumane expectations. But we have to ask: Do we really want them to succeed under those conditions? A question I find myself asking when I think about my kid’s life is: What will I not care about so he doesn’t have to either?
Doing this successfully starts with me doing it for myself, of course. So I’ve accepted recently that I am simply not going to get better at texting people back. But crucially, it is also something I’m going to stop fretting about. Instead of seeing it as a failing, I see it as an act of sanity, and indeed of kindness, directed towards myself.
Things I enjoyed reading
Serena Williams’ resignation letter is a good meditation on something our society massively under-acknowledges: Almost every gain is accompanied by some sort of profound loss. [Vogue]
Millennials are “the first cohort to watch their youth fade in real time, with evidence of their growing irrelevance meticulously documented in memes, trends, and headlines published on the very internet they once reigned over.” I personally love being blissfully ignorant about internet culture these days. [The Atlantic]
Advice from a death doula on living a more present and focused life. [Vox]
“I’m a big advocate of giving up on dreams. Taking away a fundamental lens through which you see yourself makes you have to reconsider who you actually are.” [The Guardian]
A fascinating read on the impact of outdoor house cats on bird populations. Anyone who thinks it would be feasible to enforce an evening curfew on cats hasn’t met many cats. [The Guardian]
“Ambition does not have to be limited to a quest for power at the expense of yourself and others. It can also be a drive for a more just world, a healthier self, a stronger community.” [Elle]
Things I enjoyed listening to
I discovered The Small Bow newsletter and accompanying Really Good Shares podcast this month. The project attempts to expand the definition of “recovery” beyond substance abuse and addiction to … everything else hard that humans go through. It’s difficult to categorize and explain, but its host and author—the former editor in chief of Gawker, who got sued into oblivion in that bizarre Hulk Hogan / Peter Thiel lawsuit in 2016—displays the kind of earnestness and vulnerability I think we need more of. Start with the first episode. [Really Good Shares]
I love when formerly hard, cynical people do some personal work and admit they’re just as soft as everyone else. A good example is Chelsea Handler on Glennon Doyle’s podcast. [We Can Do Hard Things]
Word Soup
“You might think of consciousness as a lamp, making a cone of light on the surface of a desk. Outside the yellow circle everything is dark and unknown. The usual way of approaching things is to try to extend the yellow circle into the darkness. Or perhaps to drag objects in from the dark. That is conceivable. This meditation takes things the other way. Here you depend on what is unknown and inconceivable to sustain you. The inconceivable is the source of all that comes into being. This meditation is not about making what is unknown, known. Instead it is an exercise in relying on and making friends with the inconceivable.” —John Tarrant
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An act of sanity
Your point about the sanctimommys is so on the button. Thank you for articulating that. And the line about what to not care about so as your kid doesn’t have to care about it either has stuck with me all day. So simple yet so poignant (also so challenging in reality when family foist their own values/metrics of ‘success’ and also don’t respect boundaries 😒)