I decided to pay off my text debt. Responding to everyone I’d ghosted for three years was humbling

In December 2023, on a Delhi flight in London, I made a random admission to a stranger: “I have anxiety Whatsapp.” My heart jumps a beat every time I see a notification. Often, I will see a message, but for reasons that I cannot explain, I do not have it in me to answer. Most of the time, my phone is intentionally buried in the vortex of my tote bag so that it looks like a physical task to fish it to respond to the dam of the blows it produces. Out of sight, out of my mind, is I right?

My initial self-diagnosis for my WhatsApp anxiety was submerged with information. Too much volume, too little value. Do I really need to be part of each potential trip that will probably never leave the group cat? Did I have to be in a group with 20 friends, more ventilated in groups of three and four so that we can pour out targeted tea? Do not even embark on all the fashion and beauty brands to which I entrusted my number while making an online purchase which then saw me bombing with annoying offers every two days. The only antidote of this overabundance was a digital detoxification. Over the past three years, I had extinguished all the notifications on my phone. By a bad day, my screen time was three hours. By a good day, it was about 90 minutes. The result: low screen time = high text debt.

This did not really bother me before I decided to move the cities in December 2024. Overnight, friends who felt like the family were no longer there for spontaneous meetings. Suddenly, I had to resume by counting on WhatsApp to maintain some of the most important friendships I had formed. My intensive call calendar and my long emails for regular updates were not up to our various time zones.

At the beginning of 2025, I planned to declare the bankruptcy of WhatsApp. To ignore all unanswered messages and swear that I would answer each message in the future. If people could do it with their finances, I could do it for my social life. Then, we were struck by a multitude of cosmic phenomena – eclipses, rare planetary alignments and retrogrades which are all known to affect communication – and I felt embarrassment. What if, instead of responding only to each new message that I receive, I also erase the backlog that has accumulated over the years?