The tyranny of immediacy

Millennials are often blamed for everything from the death of the recorded music industry

to, hilariously, the paper napkin industry. Among the more legitimate charges, I suppose, would be that we (yes, I’m one by virtue of having reached young adulthood around 2000) are bad at responding to messages. Which messages, you ask? Oh, all of them, I guess. It depends on how networked you are, but if I take myself as an example, then just in the past half an hour, I have ignored two notifications on WhatsApp, one on Facebook Messenger, a couple of DMs and mentions on Twitter, and one inquiring comment on Instagram. This is not even counting actual, traditional text messages (now mostly a graveyard of bank and food delivery notifications as well as one-time passwords) and emails. If this sounds like I’m bragging about how popular and in-demand I am, it really isn’t. According to a 2015 survey, most smartphone users claim to receive anything between 20-50 to 50-100 notifications a day. I have ignored all those notifications — except, I haven’t. I checked each one of them but just didn’t respond. Right now, I have a good excuse: I’m writing my column, and am dangerously close to deadline. But even otherwise, on most days, I can’t bring myself to respond to messages on time. It may not even be that I’m busy — in fact, any time I’m not actively writing something on a tight deadline, I arguably always have the time to check a message — but the fact that a message means that a response is required. I’ve realised that it’s not responding that scares me. It’s the fact that the response may beget another response, and before you know it, you’re in the throes of a full-fledged conversation, which may not only take up your time, but also derail any ongoing thought process. At the same time, paradoxically, one is also crippled by the prospect of being slotted as an unreliable flake who doesn’t respond to messages, or an insensitive boor who sees messages (I refuse to resort to underhanded measures such as disabling the blue tick option on WhatsApp) and deliberately not respond. Therefore, inspired by the suggestions in David Brooks’s column titled ‘The Golden Age Of Bailing’, which appeared in The New York Times a few weeks ago, I hereby propose three conditions under which you may allow yourself to feel okay about ignoring message notifications. Firstly, did you do it for a good reason? Were you working hard, and did you think the ping may have been work-related, only to find that a friend has sent you a variant of that ‘Aise kaise bc’ meme? Ignore away. If and when this becomes a societal norm, everyone will understand. Secondly, if you didn’t have a good reason to ignore it, did you at least bother to type in a ‘Sorry… busy… ttyl’? It just takes two seconds. One, if your autocorrect game is strong. Thirdly, did you take the sender’s feelings into account, especially if they were trying to discuss something serious with you? You may or may not be the kind of person who’d like to finish their episode of Silicon Valley before attending to a friend’s problems (let’s assume they’re good friends), but did you at least try your best to show that you care?