Here's a thought to maybe make your day (or life) a bit easier.
Do you suffer from guilt at not replying instantly when an SMS comes through from a friend or acquaintance? "How are you today?" "What's up?"
And you're, maybe, washing the dishes, or reading a book, or eating breakfast, or just "chilling," or... "otherwise indisposed" (😏). Or ya just plain don't feel like chatting with nobody.
And you feel like a heel for it.
We never had this problem, at least not as much, before the advent of the cyber-age, did we. Oh the glories of new guilt gifted to us by the miracles of technology. They enable us to do sooooo many more things we could never have dreamed of before. And sooooo much new guilt for not doing them!
None of us ever expected instant response, or presumed the sovereign right to break in unannounced any time on whatever somebody else was doing, back in the civilized days pre-internet. Somehow the internet and all its spawn have de-civilized us.
All this came to me...yet again... as I was sitting here having breakfast, in the wee pre-dawn jet-lagged hours, when an SMS came in from somebody asking "How are you today?" I really didn't feel like talking to anybody.
In a more "primitive" era (sooo much wiser than the present one) there never would have been even the least expectation of obligation to start chatting at 5AM with somebody on the other side of the world. Unless it was an end-of-the-world emergency.
But our pre-internet visceral-psychic conditioning to leap at the ring of a telephone ("It could be an emergency!") has segued organically into our visceral response to a "message" coming through. The despotism of the SMS, the primacy of the beep. All else yields and bows to its dictates.
And then the person on the other side of the world adds, "Nothing's going on here, so I thought I'd say hello."
Well, it's heartening to know how I compete with "nothing" and come out at least a little bit better. And... THAT'S what making me feel guilty for not hopping to respond? Because you had nothing to do?
It reminds me of the time, a bit before SMS's but after cellphones had pervaded the culture, I was riding a bus in Zaporozhye and a few seats ahead of me was a girl talking on her phone. I couldn't help hearing her end of the conversation: "Mmm, yeah...uh, huh...oh, nothing...just riding the bus...yeah, nothing much...mmm." And then from her bag came the ring of another phone. So she told the first phone-friend to hold on a moment, there was a call coming in, she reached into the bag, answered the other phone, and proceeded to chat: "Oh, hi...uh, huh...oh, nothing, just riding the bus...yeah...mm, hmm."
So there she was, a phone at each ear, not one but two conversations at once...about how she's doing nothing.
Why?
Because we can. And if we can, we must. Because you'd be a heel not to answer.
The culture of compulsive innocuousness, obsessive vapidity, despotic mediocrity.
Wait, did I start this by saying it could make your day (or life) a bit easier? Well, yes, it can. If you care to ponder it.
Don't become the patsy for people who know that when they have nothing better to do they can always text you because you'll always answer.
Say no. And DO "no," whenever you really want or need to. And if you've forgotten how, then you are the person (yeah, you're the one, there you are, we found you) who most of all in the world needs to find out how again.
