Stop texting
I want to talk in the real world. Humans weren’t made for living their relationships over text. We should stop doing that.
I recently took a week-long break from texting. It allowed me to take a step back and reflect on whether it is desirable that I live the rest of my life going back to my usual habits of text messaging, and I’m having my doubts.
- How I realised I needed change
- The Fundamental Problem
- The vulnerability of bids for connection
- How to live
- Conclusion
How I realised I needed change
This started more as a kind of “digital detox” and “monk mode” in light of a busy workweek, but reflecting on the experience made me realise something profound: I know I’m not an anxiously attached person, but texting (at least with some people) makes me feel like one.
I mean that in two ways: I think in some cases I (incorrectly) feel like one to others, and I’ve noticed that I have adopted some of the feelings of anxiously attached people despite being very sure that this is not my personality. I have no need in my life for these feelings nor for this image, because this is not who I am. Since they both went away with the texting, I figured that the way I otherwise do it is pathogenic.
The Fundamental Problem
I will now make the case that the fundamental problem with text messaging is that it is an instant asynchronous channel of communication.
Asynchronous channels
An asynchronous channel does not require the sender and the receiver to be present at the same time. Asynchronous channels have existed in history as long as writing has: instead of needing two people to be present in the same place at the same time talking to each other (a synchronous channel), you can write something down, put it in an agreed-upon place, leave, and have someone else go to that place to read what you wrote down, as if you are still there. An upgrade on this may be that you have an animal or a person physically carry your message for some distance. All of this is very primitive compared to the insane feats of engineering that were needed to create new synchronous channels (other than two cans on a string), like morse code transmission, phone calling, and nowadays video calling over the internet (perhaps even with screensharing).
We have a variety of high-latency asynchronous channels available to us today, in particular physical mail (mediated through the postal service) and e-mail (mediated through SMTP and DNS servers). Interestingly, high-latency asynchronous channels have been able to preserve a culture of respect even to this day: somehow, everyone understands that you start an e-mail with a salutation like you would start a letter, and end it with a wish and a signature. Everyone understands that you should put care into your grammar and spelling when sending an e-mail (out of respect for the receiver, which, if not given, may influence how they feel about your message) and spend some time making your message coherent. Perhaps you even format it in several paragraphs.
Also, when you receive a letter or an e-mail, it is understood by the sender that you may take a while (perhaps days, though generally not weeks) to read it. In turn, it is understood by you as the receiver that there is some duty or courtesy to respond to each letter or e-mail sent to you personally. In other words, in return for taking a longer time to compose the message and wait for the answer, we are guaranteed a high chance of getting a response.
Faster means dumber
Text messaging, where the message is composed quickly, sent instantly, and (usually) delivered instantly, has no such decorum.
Actually, that’s not quite accurate: in some regards, text messaging has inverse decorum. It is not just that people can choose to end a message with best wishes, it is strange when you do. It is not just that people don’t pay attention to language, but it is expected that they purposefully write improperly: ending a message in a period is abormal, and the period is seen as speaker commentary, not as functional punctuation. It means “this is really serious and I am being stern”.1 For some people, the same is true for avoiding abbreviations: “r u home tmr” is nonchalant, “Are you home tomorrow?” is concerned. And if you write a newline (i.e. if you write two paragraphs) in a message, you are being highly dramatic.
Because texting is so much faster and its culture purposefully lacks formality, the content of text messages is also much more primitive, more reactionary, and less thoughtful. None of the last 50 texts you sent would be vaguely appropriate as an e-mail, and that’s probably not because they were written sloppily or lacked best wishes, but rather because of the lack of interesting information per message. This is not unimportant: if you spend more time reacting more and thinking less, you will be a different person than if you do the converse.
Faster means fewer replies
The biggest difference between high-latency and instant asynchronous channels, however, is in if and when we can expect a reply, and in addition, how we wait.
With mail, it is clear that you can expect a reply, though that there will be some latency. You have no idea if they have read your e-mail, but you can trust that they will and since it is not an instant conversation, you don’t particularly care. In the meantime, you don’t see your last message(s) displayed to you in your e-mail client; in fact, it is a cumbersome process to go dig up what you actually wrote to someone after you do.
With texting, things are completely different. Firstly, there is large variability in how receivers use the communication channel. With some people, we can expect a reply instantly. With others, we can expect it to be at e-mail speed. With even others, they switch between these two day by day, unbeknownst to you. And lastly, a lot of times, you will just not get a reply at all. Paradoxically, your texts go unanswered more frequently than your e-mails, despite the lower effort texting takes.
Nevertheless, no matter which of these archetypes you are texting, your chat interface will make it look like you are having a live back-and-forth conversation for all of them, and this rightfully confuses you. Imagine if your e-mail client was designed like your most-frequented chat interface (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram Direct, …): your e-mails on the right in one colour, their replies on the left in a different colour. Even without read receipts – which some people have indeed turned off in their chat profiles – you would feel uncomfortable sending e-mails this way. And yet, chances are that on your smartphone, the apps you use to receive e-mail and to receive chat messages live side-by-side and both equally give you a notification when something is sent your way.
Faster means social shame
So, instant messaging is formatted as a synchronous channel. It even comes with its own “body language”: read receipts. Every interface has a little indicator that tells you which of your messages somebody “heard” (which of your letters they read) and which they didn’t. I’m not suggesting that it’s somehow evil that software companies design their interfaces this way: after all, like a synchronous conversation, the transmission is instant. What I am suggesting, is that this leaves wiggle room for social shame.
We have already established that the receiver can choose to treat your messages synchronously (i.e. respond within minutes) or asynchronously (i.e. respond much slower, or not at all). Thus, whenever you text, you risk being socially miscalibrated by assuming the conversation is “face-to-face”-style when it isn’t. And what do we do with social miscalibrations? We shame them, because this is the easiest way to teach people the rules of the civilisation.
Let’s make it concrete: you send someone a text “Do you want to go for a walk in the park later today?”. If you were speaking face-to-face, this would be perfectly calibrated and you would get a response immediately, so you expect to receive a response soon enough. But time passes, night falls, and you have been ignored. Perhaps the message was delivered, not read and not opened. Perhaps it was delivered and read through the notification, but not opened. Either of those would display to you as being “left on delivered”. Perhaps it was delivered, read and opened, but not replied to, displaying to you as “left on read”. Either way, you are apparently socially inept: you thought the situation was one thing but it was really another. And also, you asked for the attention of someone who either does not want your attention or who is just less available for you than you for them, so your “missed” text brands you as needy.
You may think this conclusion is exaggerated, but it’s not. It is widely accepted that double-texting is socially uncalibrated, deserves mockery and shame, and makes the sender needy. In real life (or synchronous communication), there is no such thing as double-texting: being “left on delivered” doesn’t exist, being “left on read” (you say something and the other person just stares at you) only happens in extremely awkward situations, and even when that happens, asking a follow-up question doesn’t make you needier or socially uncalibrated. In fact, the complete reverse is true: clarifying yourself is pro-social, and leaving an awkward silence is anti-social. Meanwhile, if the lack of a reply to your text(s) is permanent, i.e. you get ghosted, it is not the ghoster but the ghostee who accrues the shame.
Without texting, you could live your whole life without ever being perceived as needy as a result of communicating without a reply. Why don’t we just start living that way, then?
Worse than lack of signal
People sometimes say that texting is bad because you lack too much of the signal that exists in a face-to-face conversation, particularly tone, facial expression and body language. Because of this, you may not properly infer the intent of a text message, and whether a miscommunication happens is much more up to the mood of the reader.
Yet, this lack of signal can basically be relieved if you become skilled enough at texting. This is in contrast to asynchronicity: no matter how good you become at texting, you can never change the fact that sending a text is opening yourself up to being ignored.
The vulnerability of bids for connection
As a quick aside, let me zoom out from texting to generalise its fundamental problem to many other social situations.
- When you extend your hand to give someone a handshake, or raise your hand for a high-five, you are putting yourself in a vulnerable position: you give them the full power to reject you openly by “leaving you hanging”.
- When you tell a joke in a group setting, you give the rest of the group the power to let themselves laugh, or to purposefully stay silent in order to signal to you that either the content of your joke is socially unacceptable, or that you are just not welcome more generally.
- When you are a small child and you show your mum or dad a shitty drawing you made, the quality of the drawing is completely irrelevant to you and to them. You could show up with an empty sheet of paper and the situation would be unchanged. The thing is never the thing. Instead, all you are doing is going to your parent and asking them “Do you love me?” but indirectly, giving them the full power to ignore you, or break your heart, or reward you.
- When you spend some effort coming up with a material thing you expect somebody would like to receive, then go out of your way to make or buy that thing, and then you give that to them as a gift, you give them the full power to dismiss all of your effort. This is why the gift giver sits in anticipation while the gift is being opened: he is vulnerable and bracing for rejection.
- When your wife tries to cook a new meal hoping you will like it, and she comes to you with this, she gives you the power to reward her for going out of her way for you, or ignore it, or even punish her for whatever the quality may be.
- When your husband squeezes your butt while walking by, he gives you the power to pull away and swipe his hand off of you in disgust, ignore him, or start chasing him around the couch.
- When your wife scoots her butt into you while lying in bed, she gives you the power to break her heart by turning away.
- When you cold-approach a woman in the street, you – at least in these modern uncivilised times – give her the power to pretend you are air, or even castigate you for daring to interrupt her day.
- And, finally: when you text someone, you are handing them the power to ignore you or to connect with you. You put yourself in an inherently vulnerable position, and this is understood by both of you. Perhaps the mere act of putting yourself in that position, regardless of what happens next, already results in some amount of discredit with the other person.
All of the above are bids for connection. They are a question. A question makes you vulnerable, because the answer can be unlike what you wanted or it can be ignored altogether.
And, since you are often not actually texting as a bid for connection, and since there are other ways of communicating other than texting, perhaps you should not make yourself unnecessarily vulnerable by texting this way.
How to live
I want to live in the real world. I want to live my relationships face-to-face like humans have done for all of history (and before that), not face-to-screen. I don’t want to be ignored, and really, I don’t even want to be perceived as putting myself in a position where I could be ignored.
Think of how much time you have pissed away by texting people, whether it is in long form or in passing throughout the day. A little time wasted here, a little time wasted there. Your life is leaking away in the form of low-quality human interaction. If you instead aggregated all the small amounts of time you texted a person and instead just hung out with them for that same amount of time in one go, everyone would win.
How do you meet up?
It is sometimes advised that you should use texting only to arrange real-life meetups. This advice comes from a similar angle as this article: don’t try to make human connections over a non-human medium. But I want to go one step further: you probably should not even arrange your meetups over text. You should avoid texting altogether.
In a hypernovel world, it helps to think about how people used to do things before engineers like myself innovated us far beyond what our genetics ever anticipated for. How did people meet up before there was texting? You just asked them to their face.
So, how do you avoid texting someone to hang out, only to be ignored? Well, if you live in each other’s physical worlds, there is no point using texts to see when you can hang out. Next time you see each other, take our your agendas and use your face.
If you don’t live in each other’s physical worlds, or if you need to arrange something sooner than the next time you are guaranteed to cross each other, then obviously you are forced to use some kind of long-distance technology. Actually, in cases where you didn’t even meet in-person originally, e.g. through a dating app (which you should uninstall) or a mutual contact, we could even say that your existence itself depends on such technology: if you could not communicate with someone whom you can’t see, functionally this is no different than if you never existed in the world at all. So let’s look at how you can use this technology without running into the social traps that make you look needy.
Don’t broadcast with question marks
There are actually two scenarios for wanting to meet up with someone: either you are delivering an impersonal broadcast, or you are specifically asking for their engagement. This would be the difference between “There’s a party, if you want to come.” and “There’s a party, do you want to go together?”. Broadcasts, like flyers and billboards and newspapers and television and so on, are one-way messages: you expect people to hear but not reply.2 This is mutually understood, and so nobody would think of a billboard as needy.
Question marks make you vulnerable: when they are ignored, you have less social capital to afford another question mark. Here is a perfect example, staying on topic: if you ask “Are you coming to that party tomorrow?” and you are ignored, sending “Are you coming to this other party?” two weeks later counts as double-texting and brands you as desperate.
It is good to know that this opportunity of being ignored is entirely avoidable: after all, you didn’t even care about the answer. You actually just meant to say “There’s a party tomorrow, just so you know.” and even five of those messages in a row are completely harmless. It may even make you the person people go to for finding out the place-to-be, which is real social status. And indeed, your plan to go to the event doesn’t depend on theirs either way, so you should phrase your message as a one-way broadcast, not as half of a two-way interaction.
Agreements over synchronous channels
In the other case, you should abide by the following extension of “make plans in real life”: make agreements over synchronous channels and broadcast reminders over asynchronous channels.
So, let’s say you know a girl through a dating app, and you otherwise don’t cross each other in life. You may be compatible and match well once you are in a room together, but for whatever reason, she is difficult to get out of her cave into that room with you, and texting “Do you want to go to place X at time Y?” will get you left-on-delivered or left-on-read, i.e. ignored.
Better idea: Call her. Make your proposal. Hear her immediate reaction.
The one reaction you are least likely to get from someone is complete silence; you may get a straight yes or a straight no, you may get hesitant acceptance (approximate yes), or you may get awkward excuse-finding (approximate no). When the answer is vague, you can even choose to be assertive and just call out the information you picked up on on-the-spot: “You don’t sound excited, so if you’re not really interested, just tell me now, I’m not made of glass.” Over text this would be confrontational, over the phone this would make you socially intelligent. After the call, if you got an acceptance, you can text the agreed-upon time and location so you both remember better. It doesn’t matter what happens to this asynchronous message: it is proof that an answer was already given, not a question waiting for an answer.
You can broadcast a reminder if you please. And if this person flakes on you (and betrays their word in doing so), that is at least as informative w.r.t. their character as having gone on the date.
How can people rely on you?
Phone calls exist. You can perfectly imagine someone who replies to 0% of texts and 100% of phone calls.
One thing I enjoyed about not texting anyone for a week was that I could physically put as much distance between me and my phone as possible, forgetting its existence for hours on end. This is not possible if you want to be available for emergency calls at all times, but I’m sure there exists some kind of software solution for this such that it’s impossible to access your phone but calls do come through.
It should be noted that calling also has pointless norms and games associated with it: if the receiver doesn’t pick up the phone, whether intended or not, the person who placed the call is again automatically seen as somehow needy (“I want to talk to you even though it is inconvenient to you or you don’t want to talk to me”). Trying again later solidifies the status of being needy, and puts the receiver on a social pedestal (“you have all the time in the world for me, but I don’t for you”).
I want to live in a world where calling someone’s phone is like ringing their home phone, or their doorbell: if they’re not home and miss it, it’s like nothing happened, and you can try again later without being seen as needy. If you want to live like this too, you should establish that contract with the people you would call: and, because they can see on modern devices that they missed your call, it should be courtesy of the receiver to call back. Not text back. Not ignore.
How do you talk with someone you don’t meet?
If you want to talk with someone without meeting them in real life, essentially what you have is a pen pal. Do you want a pen pal? If yes, consider talking to them over e-mail (yes, I’m serious, but only insofar you want an actual pen pal). If no, then you just don’t talk to them between meetups. Or you voice/video call.
Here is a corollary of the above rule, rephrased: don’t text to talk with someone, only to talk at someone. If you send texts that necessitate a reply, you are dooming yourself. Broadcast over text. Talk over the phone.
Conclusion
The fundamental problem with texting is that it is an instant asynchronous communication channel: it deceives you into using it as if it is synchronous, putting you into a position where you can look socially uncalibrated, which is purely up to the receiver by ignoring you or not.
Perhaps I am being too romantic, but I want to live my life such that the real world, or at the very least synchronous communication, is the default medium for connection.
I say all of this not because I’m a bad texter. The complete opposite is true: I get a lot of enjoyment out of a flowing conversation over text, and plenty of people have let me know by their actions that they really enjoy texting me (probably because I’m quick and a good writer). But this is exactly the problem: very rarely is there a person present on both ends of the channel at the same time, either from the start (so you are exchanging half-sentences at the speed of messenger pigeons) or all of a sudden in the middle of a nice dynamic. Both of them are so disappointing that I just don’t want to deal with these dynamics anymore, sorry.
Back when I was in high school in the late 2010s, I used to get called out for my usage of periods to end sentences as being “elitist”. A single pixel on a screen made people retreat into their inferiority complexes. ↩︎
As a computer scientist, the different purposes of TCP and UDP come to mind as a perfect example of this distinction. ↩︎
