I decided to pay off my text debt. Responding to everyone I’d ghosted for three years was humbling

In December 2023, on a flight from Delhi to London, I made a random admission to a stranger: “I have WhatsApp anxiety.” My heart skips a beat every time I see a notification. Often, I will see a message, but for reasons I cannot explain, I do not have it in me to reply. On most days, my phone is intentionally buried in the vortex of my tote bag so that it feels like a physical task to fish it out to respond to the barrage of dings it produces. Out of sight, out of mind, am I right?

My initial self-diagnosis for my WhatsApp anxiety was information overwhelm. Too much volume, too little value. Did I really need to be a part of every potential trip that would probably never make it out of the group chat? Did I need to be in a group with 20 friends, further broken down into groups of three and four so we could spill targeted tea? Don’t even get me started on all the fashion and beauty brands I had entrusted my number to while making an online purchase that then saw it fit to bombard me with pesky offers every other day. The only antidote to this glut was a digital detox. For the last three years, I had turned off all notifications on my phone. On a bad day, my screen time was three hours. On a good day, it was around 90 minutes. The outcome: Low screen time = high text debt.

I didn’t really mind until I decided to move cities in December 2024. Overnight, friends who felt like family were no longer around for spontaneous meetups. Suddenly, I had to resume relying on WhatsApp to maintain some of the most important friendships I had built. My intensive call schedule and long emails for regular updates were no match for our different time zones.

At the beginning of 2025, I had planned on declaring WhatsApp bankruptcy. To ignore all unanswered messages and swear that I would respond to every message going forward. If people could do this with their finances, I could do this for my social life. Then, we were hit with a host of cosmic phenomena—eclipses, rare planetary alignments and retrogrades that are all known to affect communication—and I felt further emboldened. What if, instead of only responding to every new message I receive, I also clear the backlog that has built up over the years?

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