The unbearable lightness of overcommunication
Why are people not responding? I have three hypotheses.
I have spent the past week waiting for people to respond. Waiting for my colleague to respond about a meeting they originally initiated. Waiting for my friend to confirm if the bar I booked works for them. Waiting for my Dad to see my missed call and to return it. Waiting for a venue to confirm an event for which I will pay them around 10K. Waiting for an MRI vendor to give me quotes for a new scanner for which I will pay millions.
Why are people not responding? I have three hypotheses:
My friends and colleagues don’t like talking to me
At the danger of sounding like a teenager, but this is a real possibility that crosses my mind several times a day. Every message I send feeds back a weird mixture of fear that I will not receive a reply, and dread that I will, only to be misunderstood or prompted to send another message.
I imagine my friends and colleagues receiving my messages with the same mixture of fear and dread, as very few notifications bring good news these days. Sure, an occasional meme might brighten the day, but the rest of the time it is just another bullet point on the tasks stack, another yellow emoji, another DM that requires a constructive and witty instant response.
To add insult to injury, most of these interactions are comedies of misunderstanding. I exchanged 20+ messages with my Mom about her upcoming ophthalmologist visit, only to realize, upon calling her, that the ophthalmologist is in another country and she is crossing the Macedonian border as we speak. Somehow we both forgot to discuss where the doctor is located.
I exchanged five e-mails with a colleague discussing an MRI scan, before realizing that neither of us had access to the files we were discussing. It took us five more days and five more people to transfer these files from a CD in Macedonia to a Google drive in the cloud, and I don’t want to know how many privacy laws we broke in the process. We all wasted precious hours of our lives making ourselves misunderstood.
So yeah, if my friends and family don’t like talking to me, they have a really weird way of showing it.
My friends and colleagues are overwhelmed
This seems like a more likely explanation. We are reading ourselves to death, engulfed by words while the world recedes from our grasp. We see half a million words each day, which is the equivalent of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, yet all of these words come without non-verbal clues, which some say account for 90% of communication.
On top of it, these words also come at us with big pauses between them. Have you noticed how awkward gaps in conversation are in real life? When they are longer than 200ms we get fidgety. So what happens when we text? Seconds pass, the seconds feel like hours, and then we open another conversation, or another tab, or another beer. By the time the response arrives we are doing five other things, and those things are also most likely on standby. No amount of ritalin can get us out of this attention-grabbing black hole.
The Japanese have invented a term for what we should be doing when we are actively listening. It is called aizuchi, and it means interjecting conversations with phatic expressions (‘yes’, ‘I see’) that reassure the speaker that we are paying attention. Is there an aizuchi equivalent of texting? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
We are all LARPing
This one is the scariest. It started creeping on me during the pandemic, when I read Justin H Smith’s essay called Click the boats. In it Smith argued that we are becomming cannon fodder for the algorithms that make us click captchas while they shape the world. We are all live action roll-playing (LARPing) and the constant back-and-forth is just the byproduct that is supposed to convince us that we are being productive.
Since reading that essay I keep wondering how people functioned before the internet. Meetings still happened, didn’t they? So why do I now have to create a fucking Doodle poll every time I need to get three people on the same call? I once tried to break down Doodle in manageable steps, and realized that it takes 100+ clickable actions for a meeting to take place. Whose interest is this in, aside from Doodle’s, Google’s, or whatever other startup pretending to be the next double-o heaven?
Is all that clicking really part of my billable hours? What about the billable hours of CEOs and celebrities? Do they also have to click boats and go through two-factor authentification to prove that they are human? If not, I am sure some deepfake technology is coming for them.
All revolutions eat their children, so it should come as no surprise that we are getting chewed up by revolutionary communication tools. These tools do a great job of keeping us engaged, but somehow they also manage to lower our productivity. We keep worrying that we will be taken over by superintelligent AI, but maybe all it takes is an average algorithm to stop us from communicating effectively.
Have people always felt this way? Isn’t this inability to communicate exactly what Kundera was writing about half a century ago? Not sure, but I know there is a limit to how much communication one can take.
As Adam Mastroianni once said, good conversations have lots of doorknobs. Internet algorithms do not. They are happy to keep you in the same echo chamber, banging your head against the door. So turn off those notifications. Ignore DMs for a day. While we are at it, turn off the internet and see what other doorknobs are within reach.
Whatever you do, please don’t DM me expecting an answer in the next few minutes. Until I train the StikovGPT, I am joining the ranks of those who take weeks to reply. For important issues you (should) know better ways to reach me.
nice essay :)