slow living in the age of instant messaging
my wish to slow down communication styles and ignore our "instant-everything" world
In the early days of Facebook, you were able to see when people were either online or offline, meaning either available to chat or not available to chat. But now, we have found ourselves in constant conversations with countless people practically 24/7. It’s got to the point where if you haven’t received a message from someone in a while, it becomes a cause for concern. Is this really the best way to communicate with our friends and the people we love?
In the past year or so, I have recently got myself, what you would call, a life. I was always the friend at school who tried to make plans in the group chat that would never come to fruition because they would all be busy with family things or simply had other plans with other friends. I relied on them for my own joy way too much but that’s another story. It wasn’t until I invited more slowness into my life and took time to find out who I really was and what I liked about myself and the world around me that I joined the “Sorry I took so long to reply!” club. But what they don’t tell you is that this club is filled with an odd, heavy air of constant guilt.
I feel bad if I haven’t responded to my friends the same day but then sometimes I get overwhelmed by messages or I simply don’t want to be on my phone that day and the unanswered messages start to feel like something I should be putting on a to-do list. But we used to communicate slowly like this at one point.
We used to send letters that would take time to write by hand and send through the post that would take a while to process and then more time to journey over to our friend’s doorstep. After that, our friend may wait for the perfect time to settle in with our letter with a cup of tea on the sofa and spend more time reading the pages we have written. Some words may be a little harder to read than others so they’d have to use context clues to figure out if that says kiss or less. They may read it a couple more times before settling down at their own desk to handwrite something back. All the while you’re back home having experiences that you can’t wait to tell your friend about in your next letter after you receive theirs in the post.
Take this and replace handwriting with a physical keyboard and you’ve got email. Now replace the keyboard with a touchscreen keyboard and it gets a little ugly.
The waiting used to be the best bit. It was a little sense of excitement at the back of your mind that something will come in the post (or your inbox) at some point in the near future but it also allowed you to get on with your own life without this sense of guilt. I know some people search for this same feeling of delayed gratification by not checking the next-day delivery box because not only does forgetting you bought something online and getting a little surprise at your doorstep a week later make for a nice moment in your day, but you don’t really need that glass jar for your kitchen counter ASAP, do you?
Our lives used to be much slower, and I think we were happier this way but we just didn’t know it. The instant-everything world we live in at the moment—same-day delivery, entire meals ready in five minutes (“instant” noodles!), 24-hour stories, all-year-round strawberries, micro-trends, fast fashion, everything about Microsoft Teams for the love of god—has even made communicating with our friends feel like a chore.
When I get wrapped up in my hobbies and projects and work life and come back to a few piles of WhatsApp message bubbles on my phone, I don’t want to feel guilty that it’s been a while. And I’ll understand that when my friends take a while to reply it just means they’re out there collecting experiences too, some of which I’ll get to hear about. Not that something bad must have happened to them or they’re too busy for me or they hate me. My search for a slower lifestyle should also include the way I communicate with my friends. When we slow down, we become more intentional and the last thing I want is for my friendships to become something flippant that I don’t pay real attention to.
In an ideal world, we’d all live 10 minutes from our friends and have real conversations face-to-face and only use instant messaging to confirm details for meet-ups or things that actually require quick responses. But for now, we should try to feel less guilty about not replying instantly to our friends and remind them to do the same. This world demands so much from us and its demands are getting quicker and expecting quicker results, but we don’t have to listen. Take your time! With friendships, with leisure, with food, with relationships, with everything you can.
Hello readers! Thank you for reading this week’s post. I hope you were able to take something away from it. Honestly, I would just love to return back to the early internet days. As I was writing this, I was thinking how ChatGPT is like an instant version of Google which was like an instant version of going to the library and reading a book. God knows what’s next! Are you a little frightened, I’m a little frightened.
I hope you’ve been having a lovely week. I’ll see you next Wednesday <3
Love thinking about an un-replied text as my friends out collecting memories <3
i really needed this