Why You Ignore Texts From Friends

Imagine you are back in time. It can be at any point in history: from antiquity up until just a decade ago. Imagine you’ve written and sent a letter to your friend Mary.

Now, does any of the following happen?

Do you start obsessing over when Mary opened the letter?

Do you obsess over when she read it?

Do you wonder what Mary was doing at the time your letter arrived, and so speculate whether she should have opened your letter right away?

Do you have an image in your mind of Mary going about her day with your letter sitting there open (a.k.a. left on “seen”)?

Or, do you have an image of her sitting at her desk writing, with your letter still unopened? Do you think “Oh, there she is writing, how come is she not writing to me?”

Modern Anxiety

These are astronomical levels of anxiety over a letter.

Yet, we accept them as natural — or at best as inevitable — in our daily online interactions. Anxiety and rumination seem to be inextricably linked to instant messaging.

People can see when we are online, and when we were last online. They know whether we were online and did not open their message. They know whether we opened the message and did not reply. They can see a comment we post somewhere, or a picture we get tagged in, or that we reply to a group chat but not to them.

In other words, people have endless opportunities to feel ignored.

And our culture prefers to deal with all these anxieties by amping up the pressure to respond.

“Instant” text communication is not natural. We have only started to communicate like this with each other in the past few years.

The Pressure to Respond

The pressure to always be communicating is colossal.

Regardless of whether you have something to say or not, regardless of whether you need time or energy to gather your thoughts, regardless of your own inner needs, rhythm and flow, regardless if you’re just not “feeling it” right now, you are under pressure to respond.

To adapt a popular saying in the technology world: This pressure is not a bug, it’s a feature.

The design is to be stimulated, if not positively (“Hey, my friend is messaging me!”), then negatively: like with bright alarmist-red notification icons that poke at your eyes until you click on them. Or like the social cost that comes from turning off your phone, muting your notifications, or just not replying.

Who Are We Talking With?

“Instant” communication has nothing to do with the people involved, with their personalities, with their unique ways of relating.

It’s mechanical, impersonal, and dominating. It is much more about “acknowledging” the message than it is about what exactly you are saying. In fact, research shows that the relationship between the sender and the receiver of an instant message does not affect the sender’s expectations of an immediate reply.

Instant messaging is empty. And it has nothing to do with how much you value the other person.

With all the clever and inventive ways we are adding some life and flavor to our messages (“reactions”, emojis, GIFs), it is all still a hologram of human interaction. It can be great for a relaxed way to keep in touch. But it can never replace in-person relationships, try as we might to cram all the nuance of relating into our little devices.

When we talk with somebody in person, we subconsciously gather a lot of information about them. In text, we are just looking at a screen and project much more from ourselves than we glean from the other person. Most people react to this subconscious uncertainty by demanding more and more reassurances from their spiritless screen.

So if you ever feel the pangs of guilt (and entrapment) when a friend messages you a “Hello??” while you were taking an hour, or even a minute, to write back…

Or when you get a “Guys, I know you’re seeing my messages!” from someone who just fired a bunch of questions in a group chat…

Or when someone announces they are now entitled to your time and attention when they hit you with an “Oh good, you’re online!”…

Remember, you’re not evil.

You’re just a human being. We all have different rhythms. Some of us need a little more silence. And when we shut down, it rarely is to hurt others. Most often, it is simple self-preservation that comes automatically and even involuntary.

What Can We Do About It?

Personally, I’ve tried telling people that I easily burn out from technology and sometimes I’ll take a while or just won’t reply to all their messages.

Most say that, actually, they feel the same way. Some look at me like I’m speaking Greek. One notable case was a friend who yelled at me “Well, what are you going to do about it?” I said, “What I’ll do is… I won’t reply to your messages.”

This is not a tutorial on how to fix your tendency to ignore texts from friends. There’s nothing wrong with you, and nothing needs fixing. You’ve simply landed in a manic episode of human history. You can try your very best and join the parade: reply to everything as fast as you can, regardless of how intrusive it can feel. Or you can try to negotiate and set some boundaries with your people. But in any case, try to be patient with your self in a world that micromanages the most subtle dimensions of how humans relate.