I Can’t Deal with Text Messages Anymore.

I Don’t Like Text Messages.

I’ll come right out and say it:

I don’t like text messages.

I’m upfront about it, though–I tell people who I view as potential friends, “I don’t text. I suck at it. If you want to reach me, email me. And even then, only if it’s really important.” I’ll admit, text messaging has its place: “Hey, I forgot to add this to the list but can you pick up a few honeycrisps for Lulu?” or “Hey Omma can you tell me again what brand of rice flour you like?” And I’ll go even further and say that for some–those who have crippling anxiety about talking to people in-person or on the phone–text messaging can offer a line of communication that wouldn’t otherwise exist.

But I also find that text messages encourage a sort of “shortcut” in relationships. Or, put another way, offer a convenient screen (pun intended) between communication and the ensuing consequences. If you don’t want to deal with the immediate aftermath of emotionally unloading on someone, then text it. My cousin once got dumped through a series of aloof text messages. I really can’t think of a more cruel way to handle something like that. I get that it’s easier to communicate with someone via text; but, that’s just it–some conversations were not meant to be easy. They should be hard. Because hard things promote growth.

I also think text messages give license to people in a way I find intrusive and, well, rude.

Let me ask you: have relationships really improved in any measurable way from the days when one needed to pick up the phone and call someone to talk to them? Have text messages facilitated access to otherwise unplumbed depths in our friendships, an access that didn’t exist when we had to knock on a person’s door to have a chat? Are we now better off, socially and emotionally, because it’s so much cheaper to send hundreds of instant messages a day than to pull out a pen and write an actual letter?

If the answer to this is “no, we’re not better off,” let me ask you another question: would you feel comfortable calling someone 15 times a day for any old random thing that popped into your head? Or knocking on their door at breakfast, lunch, and dinner to show them a picture of your faucet? Or write them a letter every single day to tell them about how many times your dog went potty? If the answer to this is, “no” (as it would be for any normal human being), why is it ok to do this via instant communication?

The thing is, though the cost of communication has become much lower, mental rent has not. If anything, we have so crammed our lives with cheap information, data we picked up at the informational equivalent of a garage sale, that space is at an all time low. Perhaps twenty years ago, when social media was barely a fully-formed idea, I had plenty of room for words about the state of your kitchen faucet or pet’s digestive habits; but today, my intellectual and emotional corridors are packed with useless information, as the amount of things taking up space “rent free” inside my head has reached capacity. Thus, while it may cost you nothing to share all these random bits of your life, I am less inclined to part with the precious unoccupied spaces in my brain to make room for them.

More importantly, I did not agree, and have never agreed, to take time out of my day to respond to them.

We’ve somehow tricked ourselves into believing that because “it only takes a second to respond,” making space for such low-cost exchanges should be equally effortless. But is the little “ding” that goes off on your phone, diverting your attention, really any different from getting up to answer the door every 5 minutes? I think we can agree that it is way not cool to ring someone’s doorbell every 5 minutes. Is it really that “easy” to drop everything you’re doing–writing a memo, putting together a deck for a meeting, having said meeting, baking a cake–and turn to a string of 15 text messages about people you don’t know and their cats? And is it really that simple to file away all the inane messages you have to reply to within a set period of time because of some unspoken social edict that makes you the asshole for not doing so?

Maybe five years ago, it was ok to ignore text messages like these or, at least, take some time replying to them; but cultural norms have, predictably, shifted with technology: “Ignoring messages is frowned upon in these always-on times,” writes Jackie Carlise for this essay in the NYT. And “always-on” is an apt description. According to one study, 30% of adults admit to being “almost always online.”

When I first started practicing at the Firm in 2004, we were all given Blackberries. And I remember thinking that even though it was extremely convenient, it also robbed me of any plausible deniability. I could no longer say, “Oh, sorry, I didn’t get your email until I got in this morning.” And because I could no longer say that, there was an implicit expectation that work didn’t end when I left the office. It didn’t end when I went to sleep. It didn’t even end when I went to the freakin’ bathroom because now, I didn’t need to lug a laptop around with me to remain accessible. This expectation expanded exponentially when airplanes started offering wi-fi. My clients could reach me anywhere, anytime, and therefore, they could take up all the intellectual space they wanted and demand a response, unless I set my own boundaries.

I think many people, particularly millennials and younger, would view the above example as toxic. We all deserve a break from work. It’s not fair to expect someone to remain on-call 24/7 every single day of their lives. Why is it different in the social arena? I find it odd that people get so bent out of shape when they don’t receive a reply to their text messages, but never bother to ask, “Well, am I being disrespectful by sending this 17th text message of the day?”

We have so lowered the cost of communication, is it any wonder that communication, itself, has begun to lose meaning? It’s now so inexpensive to share our thoughts with people, that we have grown careless about the thoughts we choose to share (in as much as we’ve grown careless about how we share them). It’s analogous to the development of digital cameras–back when we were limited to film and each image carried a cost, we took a degree of care in capturing our memories. But with the ubiquity of camera phones and the seemingly endless space for storing pics of our kitchen sink, that cost no longer exists. And we are reaping the unintended and ironic consequences of excessive efficiency–the dilution of one of the most fundamental, bedrock cornerstones of healthy, sustainable relationships:

Communication.

Ask yourself, if you got to text personal messages to someone only 4 times a month, wouldn’t you make sure that what you texted them really counted? And as a recipient of text messages… wouldn’t it be nice knowing that each text you received was carefully thought over, subjected to the kind of consideration that makes them worth the notification bell? Instead, not ONLY have we replaced vast portions of in-person interactions with digitized communication, we are incentivized to send out lazy communications inside a vacuum: screenshots instead of actual sentences, a viral TikTok as proxy for a full conversation, half-formed ideas and random musings with vague punctuation. And we do this without having to be accountable to the immediate consequences one would necessarily confront when speaking face-to-face or even on the phone.

At some point, it is inevitable that this type of lazy communication bleeds into every other type of communication we engage in–not just on our phones.

Before you accuse me of being a heartless, antisocial, asshole, I do think there’s room for meaningful exchanges via text messaging. In fact, that’s my point. If we treated instant communications as if they were taxed, we would undertake the effort to ensure they were worth that tax.

I guess this is all to say… Please don’t text me more than 4 times a month. Please.

And if you’re waiting for me to reply to your 11th message of the day…? Unless someone has died, don’t hold your breath.

Thoughts On This Week’s Topic?

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Parting Thoughts.

My father used to gift me with a handwritten birthday card every single birthday since I can remember. It was only a few years ago that the cards stopped. I loved his handwriting, each letter uniformly slanted and so professional looking. And no sooner would I get past, Dear Joanne, than tears would threaten to spill down my face. He always ended the card with, “Love, Your Dad.”

For someone who never got to hear those words spoken out loud, seeing them written in his handwriting–it was important.

Now, I get a text message on my birthday.

And I get it–he’s older and I don’t live in Chicago anymore. He can’t just hand me an envelope containing a pink card made of thick card stock with swirly calligraphic letters outlined in glitter. I do get it.

But somehow, “Love, Your Dad” in a text message? It doesn’t have the same impact as when written by his own actual hand.

Still, it was a good, long run. Even as I write this, I can feel a squeeze in my chest knowing that I have more than 40 handwritten birthday cards from my otherwise uncommunicative father. Man, I am a lucky girl indeed, to have parents who love me as much as mine do.

Wishing you all the best,
-Joanne

Comments & Questions.