I Can’t Respond to Your Constant Deluge of TikTok Videos
Should I improve my text-back abilities or should my friends understand?
mixed feelings’ multi-voiced advice column features a mental health expert or writer who responds to your most pressing existential conundrums. Use our anonymous form to be considered for a future newsletter. This week, writer and editor explores how to be a “good friend” in the age of constant connectivity.
dear mixed feelings,
I am 25 working as a social media associate for a Fashion company! I find that at the end of the work day I am so exhausted from staring at my screens, taking meetings, checking slack, responding to emails, and viewing DMs that I am so depleted I barely have mental space to respond to text messages.
I find that I am missing messages, forgetting to respond, taking a long time to respond or giving responses that are disinterested. I love my friends and want to continue maintaining our connection. I feel like a really bad friend when it takes me a long time to respond. I also feel that people aren’t going to want to keep in contact with me when my responses are so flaky.
When I am in person with someone I am extremely present. It’s much easier to give my energy that way. But now everyone is in different cities or timezones with different schedules so it’s hard to be IRL. I also do respond to time sensitive messages appropriately. It’s more so the sending TikToks, events and daily catchups that feel burdensome.
Is this just a me problem or is everyone burnt out from living in an increasingly digital age? Should I improve my text back abilities or should my friends understand? —AnnaBanana99, she/her
Delia Cai is a writer and editor based in New York. She writes the culture newsletter, Deez Links.
hey AnnaBanana99,
Friendships, of course, are the secret ingredient that makes life and all of its digital obligations bearable — enjoyable, even. But as you’ve noticed, constant connectivity has become both a blessing and a curse for how we conduct our friendships now. After all, it is much easier for us to stay in touch with friends, especially long-distance ones, than it has been for any other generation in history. But the problem is that everyone has slightly different digital habits and preferences, as well as general needs and expectations within a friendship.
Navigating those kinds of digital-friendship nuances took me the better part of my twenties. After college, most of my best friends and I wound up in different parts of the country, and it was a struggle to stay connected. We wanted to recreate that college-y feeling of being able to spontaneously barge into each others’ apartments on whim with crazy gossip or an idea for an adventure. What was hard to see was how each of our lives was taking a shape of its own, complete with new demands on our time and attention. For example, my old roommate was clerking for a federal judge in the midwest, and that meant she was much less able to spend time on her phone during the day than, say, someone who was twiddling their thumbs at a boring internship all day in DC (me).
For a while, I felt resentful that she didn’t seem interested in keeping up with the steady stream of memes, videos, and tweets that I sent her, because that was my attempt to stay connected to her — after all, we were starting to have less and less in common with every passing day. We needed something to talk about, right? Eventually, this friend explained to me point blank that she simply couldn’t spend her time, even after work hours, looking at stuff on the internet. I felt bummed out, but I was glad she was up front about her needs, because I had started wondering if maybe she just didn’t care about our friendship anymore. But she made it clear that wasn’t the case. In some ways, my friend’s bluntness with me was a much-needed moment of honesty: our lives were changing, and so our ways of relating to each other would have to as well.
In general, this kind of life stage transition requires a lot of adjustment: You’re now on your own, not only living somewhere new, but also figuring out how to assemble a new “tribe” of friends and acquaintances who will populate this next adventure with you. You’re right: it is a lot of change. And even if you weren’t navigating such a big transition, I bet that the burden of all those daily digital obligations would still feel wearisome. In fact, I don’t know a single person, at any age, who hasn’t been feeling exhausted by the endless deluge of notifications and digitized expectations that demand that we simply must respond immediately! So this is just to say that it’s extremely understandable that you’re feeling burned out. As a 32-year-old who prides herself on being “very online,” I feel it, too. I honestly think everyone I know feels overwhelmed and depleted to some extent by our digital age. It’s definitely not just you.
The tl;dr answer here is that it sounds like you’re already a great friend who shows up fully during IRL hangs and is responsive to important, timely messages. But it also sounds like the exact cadence of all that in-between digital correspondence in your friendships isn’t satisfying for you, and you would like to change that dynamic without coming across as flaky or uncaring. (It’s only flaky if you don’t address it — which you’re going to!) So now it’s time to get a little creative and like my old lawyer roommate, very, very direct.
The real work of friendship (as with any other relationship!) is figuring out how to communicate these needs and expectations, and coming up with a solution that works for all parties involved. You might not have a ton of practice doing that, and that’s extremely okay — friendships often feel so instinctive and easy, especially early in our lives, that the idea of talking out the nuts and bolts of how you conduct a friendship feels…kind of weird. But this is the part of life when you get to think deeply about the exact structure of your relationships, and to start asking for what you need. The friends who are worth keeping will be understanding and more than willing to figure out a compromise that works for everyone involved.
I wanted to get some expert guidance for you from a pair of women I know who are basically both “expert friends” and “friendship expats.” Erica Cerulo and Claire Mazur are friends and business partners who have been working together for the past 15 years; they currently run the newsletter and podcast series A Thing or Two and a romance fiction publishing company, 831 Stories. In 2019, they published a book together called Work Wife: The Power of Female Friendship to Drive Successful Businesses, so if there’s anyone who understands the idea of friendship as a thoughtful, long-term collaboration, it’s Mazur and Cerulo.
When I called them up, both women could immediately relate to the feeling of exhaustion with the endless digital catch-ups. “What we're all suffering from is this recreation of personalized social media feeds,” Mazur noted, who told me that she has her own mixed feelings on this type of meme- and link-filled messaging: “You have to watch the thing, and then react to it? But what if you're not in the place to be watching it because you don't have headphones or you just, like, don't have two minutes to watch a TikTok? It's a very different thing than responding to an actual text message.”
Of course, there’s a reason we rely so heavily on this medium for conducting our friendships. The immediacy of text messages are the closest approximation we have to that period of high school and college-esque friendship, when everyone’s available and hanging out all the time. Cerulo noted that this is especially true of group chats (which are not something you mentioned explicitly in your letter, but I imagine that if they don’t play a big role in your social life, they do for many others in your shoes): “I think it’s really hard when you’re used to having this daily friendship conducted in person, and then it’s like, well this group chat is the next best thing to maintain the same level of intimacy.”
But it’s also perfectly fine and normal to want to use digital correspondence simply as a tool for making plans for actual bonding/intimacy time, which is what it sounds like you’re leaning toward. I think this is a good direction to explore! Cerulo recently attended her 20th college reunion, and she told me the experience reminded her that true intimacy is less about those “little bitsy exchanges” and more about jumping right back into meaty conversations even if you’ve gone months without speaking. “I do think that some of the constant contact stuff comes from the insecurity we all get about maintaining relationships,” Cerulo mused. Which is all to say: nothing textable will ever be as good of a substitute for some real quality time together.
So! That’s all to say that your desire to no longer have to Keep Up With The Texting is perfectly valid, and probably even healthy. The challenge, then, will be for you to figure out how to broach these conversations with your friends so that they understand it’s not that you don’t want to be friends, but that you simply need to conduct these friendships in a different way (especially in between those IRL bonding opportunities). Mazur and Cerulo both proposed several ideas that have been test-driven by friends in their own social circles: Mazur told me about a concept called “groupchat bankruptcy:” “It is okay to just declare sometimes, ‘Hey guys, I totally missed the last week of texts. I love you all and miss you; life is hectic right now,’ Mazur explained. “I’d rather have somebody do that than go back and add emoji reactions to every text from a week back.” Another friend of Cerulo’s has instilled a strict personal policy where she will only answer texts (that aren’t urgent) on Sundays; apparently, she sits down and spends an hour or two going through missed messages. (“It feels very Victorian,” Cerulo noted.)
Whether you’re talking to the group chat or to an individual friend, these conversations don’t need to be terribly apologetic or serious. You just have to be direct and earnest—something like: “Hey, I hope you know that your friendship is important to me, and I love hearing from you, but I’m honestly pretty terrible at keeping up with texts/these catch-ups/the groupchat. I don’t want you to think I’m being flaky or that I don’t care. Is there a better way we could keep in touch?”
Both Cerulo and Mazur highly endorse phone calls, both the scheduled kind and the more spontaneous type: “I have one friend who I'm long distance with—I see her twice a year—and we both made an agreement at some point that we were going to pick up the phone even if we only had five minutes,” Mazur told me. “What has helped a lot is just remembering that picking up the phone doesn't have to mean somebody's died, or that it’ll be a full 30-minute catch-up. It can just mean, I have five minutes, and if you don't have five minutes, that's fine. But if you do, we can at least just tell each other we love each other and that everything's okay or not in our lives.” Such is the beauty of agreed-upon expectations, and the joyful jolt that even a few minutes of hearing a friend’s voice can add to your day.
One last bit of advice, courtesy of Cerulo, is that these conversations work even if we’re talking about a budding friendship or simply a new relationship with an acquaintance. You don’t have to be besties with someone for years in order to have a direct and honest chat about how you prefer phone calls, or voice notes, or in-person hangs over sending links to each other back and forth (I find that it’s simply very easy to say something like, “Honestly, I’m so terrible at responding / checking ____! But call me if you want to get coffee next week?”).
“If you’re excited about a relationship and the other person is excited too, it’s worth going a little bit whole hog and making that an in-person relationship, rather than spending months and months keeping it digital — I think that can be such an unfulfilling time suck,” Cerulo explained. “If part of the issue with tending to these digital catch-ups is because a lot of your close friends are not physically near, finding the people who can spend meaningful time with you feels like something worth throwing yourself into.” Which is to say: Ultimately, those groupchat and TikTok links aren’t going anywhere. Follow your instinct to take the most rewarding and promising connections offline as quickly and as often as possible. And in the meantime, if you want, keep those Sunday afternoons free so you can cosplay as a fancy Victorian lady tending to her correspondence.
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