I was a month into my second year of university when my mum convinced herself that I had died. She came to this conclusion after I had failed to respond to her messages and calls for a grand total of three hours. I woke up from an unplanned nap to a jumbo list of notifications that charted her descent into despair: missed calls, texts, WhatsApp messages and voicemails.

When I rang my mum back to explain that I had fallen asleep, she was minutes away from getting my dad to drive them all the way down from London to Exeter to check on me. She then made me switch the call to a FaceTime video for extra assurance that I wasn’t being held hostage.

The terrible truth is that I had actually seen my mum’s first message as soon as it was delivered, but as it wasn’t urgent I decided I would reply later rather than getting into a whole back-and-forth. Then, fatefully, I accidentally fell asleep.

Constant dialogue isn’t proof of closeness, says Yasmin Choudhury, 26

“How is it you’re always on your phone but can’t reply to my messages?” my mum has asked countless times. It’s a question that most of my Gen-Z friends have got from their parents too. They’re driven mad by the fact that my generation is glued to its devices but can’t grant the basic courtesy of a timely reply. I understand the frustration but I promise we’re not being purposefully rude.

It’s actually because we’re always on our phones that we often don’t reply to messages. Let me explain.

Because we’re constantly being bombarded with texts, emails and social media notifications, our digital to-do list is interminable. We never get round to every single reply and it often feels like too big a mental task to get sucked into another conversation when you’ve just carved out some free time for yourself.

If I get a message from a distant relative, I have to psyche myself up to reply because I want to get the tone just right. It means I delay texting back until I have time to craft a balanced response. The danger, of course, is that I never actually get round to it.

Yasmin Choudhury says she and her friends are not being purposefully rude

It’s well established at this point that young people don’t like responding to phone calls: a recent study from Sky Mobile found that 57 per cent of Gen Z admitted to blanking calls from their parents. But calls are relatively rare; replying to messages is the real challenge. A 2018 study by the messaging app Viber found that 31 per cent of people found texting a daily source of anxiety.

Research from OnePoll, which surveyed 17,000 people globally in March this year, found that half of adults feel as though their social battery is drained by the amount of time they spend speaking to people online. This rises to almost 62 per cent among Gen Z. Seen through this lens, not replying to messages is a kind of defence mechanism.

Many of us have now reached a point where we desperately want to be on our phones less. It’s reflected in the new generation of dating apps like Breeze, which don’t have a chat function and focus on setting up real meet-ups. We’re tired of the endless small talk.

The proliferation of instant messaging platforms at work, such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, have also made messaging seem like a chore. After eight hours or more of that, five days a week, going home to reply to more messages doesn’t feel like an appealing use of precious free time.

Older Gen-Zers have had smartphones in their hands since the age of about 11; the youngest have not known life without them. It means that we have established our own rules about what communication we can safely ignore. I’m not sure the same is true for my Gen-X mum or baby boomer dad.

There have been more than a few occasions where we’ve sat across from each other at a nice restaurant and I have had to say, “Just reply later!” through gritted teeth as my mum is mid-reply to an Instagram reel sent by my aunt of a cat in a bow tie stealing food from another cat. To her, an instant response is courteous and shows she cares. But this process also takes twice as long as it needs to because she punches in each letter one by one with her right index finger only.

A lean approach to replying may help with the social battery, but it can be agony when I find myself on the other end of the equation.

It goes like this: I ask a friend if they want to hang out at the weekend. They don’t reply for 24 hours. In that time they post multiple Instagram stories. I begin work on the eulogy for our 15 years of friendship. I know I am being ridiculous. I have done the same thing a hundred times!

There is never any malicious intent. We are either overwhelmed, overthinking or telling ourselves we’ll reply later “properly”. Sometimes we may even be a little thoughtless, but we don’t set out to hurt feelings. Constant dialogue isn’t proof of closeness.

There are some survival hacks, if you are fed up with waiting two to three business days for a simple reply. My friend Katrine has mastered how to get an instant reply out of me.

“I need your help, please,” she’ll message. As an anxious overthinker, I immediately worry that she is in dire straits and requires my wisdom imminently. I quickly message back, “what’s up?” while also flattered that she has come to me for advice. She replies: “Do you think I should post this selfie on my Insta story?” She’s got me right where she wants me. I reply, as always, “Yes, you look amazing.”

Source: The Times.