“Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner, I…”
This is a refrain that echoes through many of the text threads in my phone. Just today as I am writing this, I sent this apology in some form to four friends, all of whom had been left without a response since last week. Every press of a button on the keyboard for each text came with a nagging mental dialogue of guilt about leaving their words read but unregarded for an entire week:
“How could you leave them without a text for a whole week? It’s just a text, it takes maybe three minutes to write. Is this even relevant anymore? What are you doing?”
I’m no stranger to this sense of guilt from non-response, nor to the pattern which creates such a dearth of digital responsiveness. All too often, days follow a similar pattern. Early mornings which start with quiet time to myself, the only part of the day which isn’t punctuated by new conversations or work demands or constant switching between things that need to get done. Work hours that see text notifications buried between work emails, meetings, and the obligations of daily life flitting across my vision as I try to keep up with a torrent of things to do and pressure on myself to keep up with it. Evenings where I am trying to get caught up on the other tasks left undone during work hours, from coursework to meal prep to pesky car loan payments and credit card bills. The day whirs by, with barely enough energy to keep up with what lays right in front of me.
Soon, it is after 10:00, and I flop into bed with nothing else but pure mental exhaustion. I pull out my phone to rediscover the stack of notifications settled across my home screen, each a reminder of the people who I truly love, admire and care for who have not received any of the response that their thoughts, ideas, and even random musings deserve. Often, they’re menial at best—my mom asking me to identify a bird, a friend asking if I saw a news clip, or even just a hastily assembled collection of memes. Yet hidden in that stack of notifications are those that are far more substantial—grandparents waiting for a reply to a happy birthday message. A friend who has sent photos of their kid walking for the first time. My girlfriend who has sent a prayer for me and a deep dive into a topic that we dove into together.
It’s late enough for the alarm clock to roll over to four digits, and yet I’m lost in a cascade of texts left unread, each peeking out from the haze of my exhaustion as an insurmountable obstacle, adequate responses feeling all but impossible. Shame for being a “bad friend” or “selfish with my time” (claims made against myself and no one else for my lack of response) presses down on my chest and makes anything I write feel irrelevant at best and tone-deaf and insipid at worst.
Shame filtering through my exhaustion leads to a press of the power button on my phone and a faint resolution to revisit those texts in the morning. The cycle repeats itself—responses slowly make their way out to these friends, heartfelt but bathed in apologies and shame.
On and on it goes. The apologies and sense of failing my friends builds a kind of self-imposed friction between myself and those I love. It’s a unique kind of silent agony to leave your friends and family visibly “on read” as you struggle to overcome shame and inexplicable exhaustion to reply. It only gets worse as the texts build up over time—my friends are used to seeing the iMessages app appear on my Apple CarPlay screen with obscene numbers of notifications, regularly showing triple digits notifications, many of which are waiting for me to say…something…anything.
Answer, Noah. They’re just text messages. How hard can this really be? Why is this suddenly so hard? It wasn’t always like this, either.
—
There’s a number called Dunbar’s number, which figures that humans are capable of approximately 150 friendships at any given time, a number formulated from the limits of our attention span and working memory. This number was developed in the 1960s, as social networks began to spread outward with new technology but at a mere fraction of the pace of our current world.
Some experts say that as we’ve spread out and relied on digital relationships to keep up with one another (or to have relationships at all, in some cases), that number has dwindled dramatically. The way we communicate now in shorter forms by texts, byte-sized messages and shared content, relationships previously suspended in moments dedicated only to themselves now start folding into one another, dedicated hours once spent together now minced into seconds at a time across entire days. New texts and stories and replies that make up the crushed-up time we once spent together individually, now coming in together at once, layered on top of one another and serving as broken snapshots of the fuller moments previously had with one another. The pattern of life, together, has become a swollen torrent of sameness from one another at once.
Soon, entire social networks of ours blend into a single stream of communication between one another, with few pauses or breaks and with little to set apart one interaction from the next. Just as it once felt necessary to check in with friends periodically to fairly provide them with dedicated time, so it feels necessary today to keep up with friends caught in this digital deluge, providing them the time due to others in the fragmented fray of conversations happening all at once. That time due was once hours; now it is mere seconds.
“Attention economy” was once a term reserved for TV, social media and algorithms that overwhelm us with information and put us in poverty to our own attention spans. But it seems like this has become a problem in friendships themselves, the constant stream of communication leaving us unsure how to spend our time with one another and leaving us exhausted. When new interactions and friendships bleed into one another in the modern stream of texts and chats and stories, there’s little ability to decisively choose how or with whom we want to spend our time. Our ability to compartmentalize or hold space for more than a handful of friends diminishes, and we’re left exhausted and adrift in a world where we’re alone in the face of a chattering stream of texts and constant communication from even those we love most. It’s a cruel fate to be so close to those we love but feel so exhausted in keeping up with them as we want to—and feel the number of people we can actually stay close with in any meaningful sense dwindling as a result.
Where does love for one another—true, focused, undivided love for those we care about—actually fit into that deluge? Can any of us keep up the energy to embrace that love in this state?
I wish I could tell you I have an answer for resolving this digital exhaustion. It’s hard not to feel some kind of agony trying and failing to reach out to the people we love from a place of exhaustion and mental overload. Many friends are so far away, the lifeline for friendship often held through these types of communication, and it feels like this pattern is doomed to lead to separation from those who I actually do care so deeply about and want to share life with.
Maybe this kind of mental exhaustion can be healed with a better relationship with technology—setting aside time for texting friends back, organizing contacts more appropriately, using some sort of tool for replying readily to friends. But all of this feels like a darker result of the world we’re living in, being forced to inorganically create tools to manage something once so fluid and organic as choosing to remain constant in someone’s life.
Maybe this is just the reality of adult life—at 28, this is something to confront as the demands of your local life push you further away from friends and people you love, unable to keep up with them in ways you could in high school, college and even your mid-20s. That might be an even bleaker thought to reckon with.
So, for now, if you’re someone who is struggling with the same feeling of exhaustion keeping up with people and the shame that comes with it, all I can offer is comfort that is spoken toward myself as much as you: it’s okay to be tired, and the people in your life will understand. This isn’t an easy part of life to figure out.
And, in the meantime, to the friends who are still waiting for a text back from me,
“I’m sorry I haven’t gotten back to you sooner…”
Noah Schumerth graduated from Calvin University in 2019 with a major in geography and minors in architecture and urban studies. He currently lives in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood and works as the village planner in Homewood, Illinois. He enjoys reading science fiction, writing essays, cycling, and exploring Chicago by train.
