Why I Became That Friend Who's Bad at Texting

I remember when texts made my heart jump. Hours of deep conversations, real connections, passionate flirting. But lately I've become that guy: short answers, accidentally cold, ignoring loved ones.

Now there are obvious reasons to be texting-skeptical: privacy concerns, attention economy exploitation, the usual digital wellness talking points. But I want to focus on something I hear less about: how texting has become this weird psychological burden that masquerades as convenience.

I've found myself caught in this weird social trap: preferring actual human connection over its digital knockoff has made me the antisocial one. We've accidentally made avoiding bad quality communication feel like bad manners.

How We Killed Spontaneity

Texting was supposed to make communication easier, but instead it's created this always-on anxiety where every message feels worthy of a response. We no longer spontaneously show up at somebody's front door, but we text ahead to make sure they're at home instead. We've systematized spontaneity out of existence, replacing meaningful connection with meaningless preliminaries.

Want to grab coffee? That'll be three texts minimum, plus scheduling negotiations.

I recently read an article in The Atlantic where texting was described as "a looming thing that you have to do, a source of anxiety... a feeling like you're in text debt," and I felt understood. In theory we're all always available, so unreachability feels like a choice, which makes it feel rude.

This makes me envy the home phone era, where there was built-in permission to be unreachable. You could genuinely not be home, and that was just normal. The tools that promised connection ended up creating new forms of social paralysis.

Administrative Friendship Maintenance

Texts exist in this weird middle ground that's neither truly intimate nor truly casual. They feel like administrative friendship maintenance. Relationship paperwork.

Part of the problem is visual: a heartfelt message from your closest friend appears in the exact same notification style as promotional texts, neighborhood alerts, and company group chats. Even if you disable everything else, personal connection gets lumped into the same visual hierarchy as administrative tasks and advertisements. Your brain processes "Joe wants to catch up" with the same visual urgency as "Your package has been delayed" or "Don't miss our sale!" This can result in intimate communication being experienced as just another item in the notification queue.

The people texting me probably want the same thing as I do: actual presence, actual conversation. But we're trapped in this performative check-in culture where ignoring messages feels antisocial, while responding feels soul-crushing.

No Equivalent to Putting Down the Hammer

Professional hyper-availability bleeds into personal life until availability becomes work extension rather than connection. Tools like Slack train us to be instantly responsive, which we then carry into our personal lives where it becomes an oppressive expectation. I've been conditioned to treat every ping as urgent, so when I decide to let myself off the hook, it feels like I'm failing at friendship rather than protecting my sanity.

In Slow Productivity, Cal Newport points out that tiredness for knowledge workers doesn't come in the form of physical, but rather cognitive fatigue. Being a software engineer myself, perhaps this concept adds to the unbearable feeling that text messages can bring after a long day of work. After spending 8+ hours transforming thoughts into market value, my brain is done with cognitive effort.

Personal texts masquerade as leisure while actually demanding more of the same cognitive labor I've been doing all day. It requires parsing meaning and context, considering appropriate tones, craft responses that maintain relationships, and navigate social dynamics.

Physical workers get to collapse on the couch and let their bodies recover. Knowledge workers collapse on the couch and their phones immediately demand more thinking, more processing, more mental output. There's no equivalent to "putting down the hammer" when your tool is your brain.

My Messy Experiments

In my attempt to optimize for cognitive peace, I've done so at the expense of social maintenance. I've successfully implemented Newport's "do fewer things" principle, but discovered that one of those "things" was actually friendship. So I started experimenting.

I've tried specific "communication windows" (sending batches of texts to all my unread chats at once when I feel like it). But this created new problems. People who aren't as bad at texting as I am would respond quickly, restarting the ignore-cycle.

What did work better was viewing texting as my personal booking system, trying to move conversations offline immediately: "Hey, thanks for reaching out and asking how things have been lately, but let's actually discuss that over coffee instead."

Avoiding The Elaborate Charade

I've accepted that I might be perceived as "that friend who's bad at texting". When people ask me why I dislike the idea of texting so much, the answer isn't simple. It's not just the obvious stuff about screen time or digital wellness. It's everything I've described here: the cognitive burden, the visual sameness that makes love feel like spam, the way we've accidentally made avoiding shallow communication feel antisocial.

Instead of engaging in deep conversation using a medium that's widely known to be a terrible substitute for human connection, I try to be extra good at in-person presence instead. Not feeling burdened by having to respond "on time" anymore feels great, because obviously there are no actual deadlines.

Rather than apologizing for wanting actual connection instead of its digital substitute, I've found my own way to navigate this system. I've stopped participating in the elaborate charade and started focusing on what actually matters, and that is showing up when it counts.