Balancing Inclusion against Excessive Chattiness
A Retired Techie’s iMessage Experience
Those who’ve followed my retirement journey know that I’ve been trying to explore friendships, as this was a topic I didn’t think much about while heads-down in a career. I’ve written about how I’ve been navigating the friendship recession, and last week I wrote about the importance of guy’s trips. This week, I wanted to write about the other half of this quotation (“texting, just little pings”) from Scott Galloway.
Ed Elson: “What's been the most effective friendship maintenance strategy you've used to maintain close friendships since childhood?”
Scott Galloway: “Well, now it's texting, just little pings. But my go-to is I do a lot of guys' trips. I do a lot of trips with friends.”
— The ProfG Pod with Scott Galloway, December 23, 2024
The trick for me is “texting, just little pings” can require a bit of care. Forgive me for potentially overthinking this topic, but yesterday, I got to exercise a contingency plan I had previously prepared for.
What happened?
Yesterday, a friend group had a pretty admittedly chatty thread going on, and one friend very rightfully and fairly expressed an objection to the volume of texts. I had anticipated that response and had an immediate action plan.
I simply responded by creating another thread for “banter” and invited everyone who didn’t want to participate to either mute or leave that one with instructions on iMessage for how to mute or leave. The intention was to allow people to not feel like they were missing invitations to face-to-face get-togethers but still allow them to avoid the banter. A couple of people left the new “banter” thread, and I heard from another friend offline that he simply muted it.
Personally, I feel like this played out the way I wanted it to, and I am grateful for friends who are comfortable enough with the group to voice their opinions. I believe the solution of two different iMessage threads (one for announcements of get-togethers and another for banter) balanced both the positive side of text message banter for those who want it and a way to avoid overload for those who need relief.
Text banter can be good
At one end of the extreme are a set of pieces written about how text messages themselves can be an interesting cure to the male friendship crisis. While I think those pieces which refer to text-only friendships are interesting, I think text messaging is just an interesting way to maintain continuity among friends who see each other face-to-face, too. This is why I like the Wordle thread among the friends I just went to Sedona with. A recent Psychology Today article called text messaging “The Silent Glue of Friendships,” asserting that “frequency simulates intimacy by increasing the sense of presence.”
While the impact of “strong ties” (close friends and family) are well-known, research points to the power of more interactions among a wider network, including acquaintances. The research suggests that people who have more weak-tie interactions are happier than those who have fewer and that people tend to be happier on days when they have more than their average number of weak-tie interactions.
“Although we interact with a wide network of people on a daily basis, the social psychology literature has primarily focused on interactions with close friends and family. The present research tested whether subjective well-being is related not only to interactions with these strong ties but also to interactions with weak social ties (i.e., acquaintances). … The current results highlight the power of weak ties, suggesting that even social interactions with the more peripheral members of our social networks contribute to our well-being.”
Sandstrom, G. M., & Dunn, E. W. (2014). Social Interactions and Well-Being: The Surprising Power of Weak Ties. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(7), 910-922. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167214529799 (Original work published 2014)
So, the net is that I’ve decided, when possible, to participate in text message groups with a broader group of friends, and I think it’s healthy to have a bit of banter in text threads to enrich the overall experience. I also recognize that sometimes people like to watch conversations and not contribute so simply limiting the groups to those who actively banter might not be the most appropriate action either.
Potential overwhelm
I also totally see the downside of text messaging, and there can be “too much of a good thing.” One thing I personally always hated about texting was some implicit expectation of immediacy. If I don’t respond, do the people feel ghosted on the other end? Or, if I wait to respond until later, does this just add to my digital “to-do” list? In many ways, excessive text messaging can just add to overall tech fatigue.
I recognize that while banter might be good for some, a happy medium with many is to just use text messaging as a quick way to coordinate more quality face-to-face, video call, or voice call interactions, which just feel more personal to provide the right tone and body language.
Why did I wait to act?
Even though I probably overthought this situation, I also didn’t want to introduce the burden of a technology-based solution before anyone expressed a need. Unfortunately, in iMessage, there’s no way to “opt-in” to a thread. One has to be invited and then “opt-out.” So, before anyone said anything, I didn’t want to invite everyone to a new thread and force the decisions to mute or leave “just in case.”
I personally have seen this in Slack and Microsoft Teams in my consulting gigs, where there are often more threads than there are people in the company. It’s sometimes just a mental burden to decide which thread to put conversations in, to manage multiple “inboxes”, and to decide which threads to receive notifications for. As such, I thought it’d be best not to introduce more burden to the group until someone expressed a need. And it happened!
I know the downside to this waiting was that it relied on someone in the friend group to have the courage and the comfort with the rest of the group to voice an opinion. Personally, since I can have difficulties interpreting other people’s feelings, it helps me a lot when people just tell me. I appreciate the assistance. I really value the opinion of the friend who spoke out first. At a broader level, I remain grateful that this particular friend reached out to me for a coffee when I first started writing this Substack. This friend frequently offers a lot of care and advice to others.
Is there a better way?
As you can probably tell by now, I likely overthink a lot of topics, and how to best text message among friends is just one of them. What are your thoughts? Do you have other suggestions?
Banter (chatting) with friends in retirement is important. I've done the same as you on WhatsApp, where I have "announcement/emergency" groups for sharing news and organising get-togethers, and "banter/chatty" groups where we talk absolute rubbish - which is great fun. I think the chatty groups are important as they promote social cohesion, can be great fun and usually brighten up my day.