Member-only story
I Couldn’t Reply to Your Message
So I’m doing it here
I lied in the title.
It’s not that I couldn’t reply. I didn’t want to. But “couldn’t” sounded better for our friendship. Maybe your message was boring, and I didn’t dare to say it to your face. Maybe I was busy and forgot, and then it was too late.
The fact is, I didn’t reply.
It’s called micro-ghosting, and it’s okay, according to my genz children. Gotta live with our times, right?
It’s just that I get so many messages every day. I physically can’t reply to all of them. I hope you also have too many messages and can relate to my predicament.
I could have used one of these reaction emojis the messaging apps rolled out in recent years, but they feel too manipulative. I know the companies didn’t introduce them to make communication easier. It was to increase the number of notifications and glue us to our screens. It worked. And anyway, I also have too many messages to react to all of them.
Now the question is, “Do I treat everybody like you, or do I have tiers?” What you want to know is whether there are some people to whom I reply all the time. Is there a Super Friend Tier with an SLA guaranteeing a 99.9% reply rate within 8 hours?
