Issue #80: Does turning off notifications make me a bad friend?
I can't keep up with all the group chats AND real life.
If you ever: avoid reading texts because you feel anxious about responding, notice your heart beating faster when you look at your unread notification count, and/or sometimes secretly feel good when your phone dies because you have an excuse for being unreachable… we think you’ll enjoy today’s essay from
. Lilly’s the co-author of one of our favorite newsletters, , a non-fiction fellow at The Writers’ Room of Boston, and an incredible writer whose work has been published in Vox, Billboard Magazine, and The Boston Globe.
Written by
. Edited by .A few weeks ago, I found myself alone on a hospital bed in the ER. It was three in the morning, all visitors had been asked to leave, and I was awaiting the results of a CT scan to confirm what the physician’s assistant on the floor had suspected when I’d been admitted five hours prior: I had appendicitis. Most of the other patients in sight were asleep, and my husband was trying to get some rest at home, too — with his phone beside him, waiting for me to call with an update.
Bored, lonely, and anxious, I texted my group chat.
One of my best friends — a night owl — was up. I told her what was going on, and she assured me I’d be fine; her cousin had recently had an appendectomy. We moved on to different topics: Reddit, her recent job interviews, an article I’d read. By the time the doctor told me my diagnosis and that I’d be going into surgery shortly, we’d been talking for two hours and sent over 100 messages back and forth. As always seems to be the case with this group chat, somehow, someone was there to provide the exact support I needed.
I called my husband to tell him the news. While I waited for him to return to the hospital, I updated everyone else who needed to know: I left my mom a voicemail, Slacked my boss, and posted a meme about my inflamed appendix to my Close Friends story — a photo of my cat where she looked like she was screaming. When the surgery was over, I posted another Close Friends update: a photo of my feet clad in classic hospital grippy socks in the post-op recovery room, with the caption, “don’t worry guys I lived.”
This was how Aja found out. We went to a dinner a couple of weeks ago, where she asked about my decision to Instagram through my appendectomy.
“I’d never think to do that,” she said, laughing.
“It just felt like the natural way to tell people,” I shrugged.
Aja and I are only about three years apart, but it’s enough to create a chasm in our relationships to social media. She was shocked when I estimated I had 35 Instagram Close Friends. (“Name them all!” she asked me; I couldn’t, and when I got home, I saw that I actually had 46.) And that I have active group chats on iMessage, Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram — and participate in all of them every single day. As someone who grew up with a phone and has used social media for the majority of my life, I don’t always feel like I have the option not to be online in this way. Still, Aja and I relate on feeling addicted to our phones and wanting a way out.
According to a 2023 study from the University of Michigan and Common Sense, the average teen gets 240 push notifications a day. I’m in my late twenties, but I’m pretty close to that number — and it feels like it grows daily. Many are alerts from the 140 apps I have on my phone (yes, I counted, and yes, I do have an app for my hair dryer and printer) or texts announcing sales at stores I’ve shopped at once. Those are easy to turn off, delete, ignore.
It’s the dozens — sometimes hundreds — of daily notifications that come from my closest friends that are harder to face. I’ve been best friends with the same group of girls since I was in high school (some of them since middle school). Over the years, as we’ve moved farther apart geographically, we’ve developed a lot of channels to communicate. If there’s an app with a group chat feature, we’re on it. I love that about us. It reaffirms our friendship as the kind where we don’t just spend our time together “catching up.” Instead, we weave each other into the fabric of our everyday lives; sending small updates on our mornings, our outfits, our workout classes, our plans for later.
But — and I feel guilty even thinking this — it also stresses me out.
I know how to be a good friend by showing up, for both the little and big things. In my fantasy world, I’d do this over a regular breakfast date at a local diner, Sex and the City–style. In reality, with my best friends spread across the Northeast, we settle for quarterly meetups and digital conversations. We text and record voice memos for the group chat, send photos and memories on Snapchat, share opinions on the wedding photos of influencers and people from our high school on Instagram. No matter what signal one of us sends out, if one of us is free, we respond. I was so, so grateful for this unspoken tenet of our friendship when I was laid up in a hospital bed. I’m equally grateful when one of us has a rant about work, or politics, or reservation culture, or not being able to find pants that fit right. The group chats are a constant reminder we can be together without literally being together, and it keeps our bond as tight as when we all lived a ten-minute drive apart. They also change the expectations for what it means to show up as a friend in 2024.
The problem is: I feel best about these friendships when we’re talking. I feel the best about the rest of my life when my phone is off.
In addition to my best friends, I have about a dozen other things I want to prioritize in my life: my in-progress essay collection, marriage, ever-growing list of books to read, ever-growing list of pastries and desserts to bake, health, community, job, newsletter, weekly video calls with my overseas grandmother, and friends in Boston, to name a few. None of these are possible when I’m checking my phone constantly — but that doesn’t mean checking my phone to talk to my farther-flung friends is any less important. It’s a paradox that leaves me feeling guilty no matter which side I lean to at any given moment.
In an attempt to feel more present in my day-to-day life, I’ve made conscious efforts to use my phone less. Like I said, the marketing notifications were easy to turn off. Swearing off TikTok took much more willpower — especially after one of my friends still on it told me a group chat was created there, too — but I’ve stuck to my decision, even if it means I understand fewer memes. Most recently, after Snapchat introduced LinkedIn-level irrelevant notifications that you can’t toggle off (I’m talking the “someone you hated in 10th grade has an update!” kind), I went nuclear. I banned Snapchat from sending me all notifications and decided I’d occasionally check the app when I had time. It was a decision that felt inconsequential, and after my notification count immediately went down, I was glad to have done it — until I realized I was days late to seeing videos of one of my best friends trying on wedding dresses for the first time. I felt awful, and absent.
How many apps could I delete or notifications could I turn off before I became a bad friend? After all, I don’t want to silence my friends; I just want to keep up with them at my own pace. Plus, I expect them — and a whole bunch of other people in my life — to keep up with me, too. Why else would I post an Instagram story about getting surgery?
I’ve talked to my friends about this. It seems like everyone relates to some degree. One of the girls has been off Instagram for years, and requests occasional screenshots via text of big things she’s missing, which we dutifully send. Another friend periodically deletes her account, but then inevitably reactivates it after a few weeks. Growing up with social media has rendered us desperate to avoid online FOMO, especially when it relates to one another.
My friends have never confronted me about a missed text or conversation; I’ve just felt a silent shame. Text messages and push notifications intentionally create a feeling of urgency. They’re a task to be completed, an alarm to be snoozed, a problem to be solved — which is not how I like to approach conversations with the people I care about most. I’ve learned I can feel less shame by having open conversations with my friends, being enthusiastically present when I can be, and reminding myself that — no matter how plugged in I am — there will always be moments in my friends’ lives that I miss. After all, I still got to watch the dress try-on videos; I just didn’t get to respond to them as they were arriving. And other friends were available at that moment, so the future bride got the enthusiastic and immediate response she deserved.
Maybe the magic of the group chat isn’t that we’re all active all the time, responding to every notification immediately — but that we take turns. Our phones may make us feel like we need to be available at all times, but it’s not true. Instead of mourning the so-called missed moments, what if we celebrated the ability to catch up later?
When I woke up in the recovery room post-surgery, I went back to the group chat; I had a dozen unread messages. While the friend that had coached me through the night was getting some sleep, the rest of the group had chimed in: sharing updates from my husband, memes they had made about my appendix, and well wishes. Though it hurt my freshly stitched up stomach, I let out a laugh.
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I've had all notifications turned off my phone for years - banners, sounds, badges - everything. All group chats silenced. Lol, I'm a total phone grinch...but I still have friends!
I have to say that having the same group chat on multiple social media sites to catch up with would make me crazy. I'm Old, so my chats are text only. And I would have no problem with a friend saying "I have a busy week so I won't be answering', but a friend who never contributes or responds with no explanation means to me they are not interested.