A friend messaged me the other day. I saw it. I didn’t reply. A week later, I finally responded with the classic: Sorry for the late reply, just got to this.
She called me out. You didn’t just get to this, she said. I saw the double ticks.
Damn. She was right. I’d opened it. I’d registered it. But I’d also shelved it. It needed a proper reply, and at that moment, I wasn’t equipped.
Maybe it got lost between revisiting pictures from 2016 and the reminder I set to cancel my Nibble app 7-day trial on day 6. Maybe I got a call? Perhaps I’d wanted to sink back into that Substack article about reclaiming attention, ironically while still on social media. Maybe I was working one of the four jobs I need to survive under capitalism’s boot heel. Maybe I was doing nothing?
Does free time now equal availability?
I get a ping from the family group chat, which doubles as an IT helpdesk for my mum. My best friend just FaceTimed me about a White Lotus episode, and another left a voice note crying about a possible diagnosis. All this, lodged between videos of cats and genocide.
The boundaries between reception and response have collapsed.
You know you can just turn off notifications for apps you don’t want spamming you.
Yes, I am very aggressive about turning off notifications. The use case I had in mind is texts from friends, and I don’t want to turn those off. Like someone texts me something that requires thought or online connectivity, but I’m on the subway or at a concert. I want to snooze the message so it’ll remind me in a couple hours.
Sometimes for really important stuff I’ll set a timer myself, but that’s more steps than if the OS just had a “remind me later” built in.