Until recently, I hadn't really given them much thought. I attribute part of this ignorance to the feature's sheer ubiquity. Practically every mainstream messaging platform either send read receipts (indicators that display whether a recipient has read a message) or offer features with a roughly similar function - for example, Discord lacks explicit read-message indicators but instead displays user activity status. Furthermore, practically everywhere that read receipts are an option, they are enabled by default. Off the top of my head I can't think of a single case where this is not true.

In fact, I'm pretty sure the only period of time when I didn't have access to such features was a couple of months in eighth grade - but that was because my friends and I switched from Google Hangouts to a custom web messaging site I built to get around school-enforced website restrictions.

I had always thought of read receipts as just a friendly social gesture, a little nudge to the recipient saying "hey, your message has been read, and I'm thinking up a reply".

But are they really such a good thing?

Over time, I (like many others around me) have become socially conditioned to rely on these tidbits of information. I've caught myself reopening messages to friends, again and again, unprompted, to check whether they had read my texts yet; or obsessively reopening social profiles to see their activity status. And these, in the grand scheme of things, aren't productive habits but instead the result of a great human flaw: our pandora's-box-esque need to take in any information available, even when it's not good for us.

Yet, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Hiding behind the seemingly innocuous benefit of being able to check up on friends' activity lies a very nebulous and unquantifiable psychological toll.

In this modern age where users' attention is a currency worth more than gold, these tendencies are not just a waste of time but a pretty facade to the ugly truth that: the modern web drives a social paradigm designed to fracture your focus, to normalize the collective delusion of productivity we call "multitasking", and to make everything so readily accessible that we struggle not with consuming more content but choosing what content to consume.

Perhaps the term "instant messenger" speaks not just to the quickness of informational transfer but also to how quickly we are obligated to respond: instantly.

Decades ago our reaction to receiving mail wasn't to drop everything and draft a reply. Sure, it feels good to text friends knowing that you'll get a reply back within a couple of minutes, but does it feel good because it makes us feel socially closer, or because it's an addiction?

Several times in the recent past I've wished I could reset my habits and start over in a world where this level of spontaneity wasn't the norm. Seeing that I can by no means do such a thing - if covid left us with one thing it was the backbone for a truly digital-centric and digital-first society - my second best solution has been to cut back on notifications and just stop writing back quite as quickly; if I stop replying instantly, the people around me will stop expecting me to.

And in the same vein, I've been gradually opting out of read receipts; far too often I find myself trying to construct responses to my friends based off of message notification previews alone - because reading the text in full sends an unwanted read receipt.

I know I'll never get back the level of rarefied, uncontaminated focus my younger self used to have. But I'll still try. And I encourage you, the reader, to at least consider doing the same.

tags: life