Why I hate WhatsApp

or, what I'm really afraid of

on the way to a real cave in the mountains

I remember paying 35 cents per SMS to message my friends when I was in school. 80 cents if it was peak time. There was a cost to it, so you thought twice before reaching out.

But the best reference point here is not a child in school, whose social relationships were simple. Rather, I think back to my parents. They had their friends from church and Rotary, and we all lived in close proximity. They called each other regularly, met for dinner and made plans for weekends away. The options were few, but they were more than good enough. Life was small, but simple and rich.

Nowadays, anybody can send you a message without consideration for cost, and enter your attention field.

But this isn’t actually about WhatsApp. It’s about fragmentation; about the puzzle of building connection with others, while learning about and honouring the parts of myself that have lacked expression.

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I do not lack for friends.

I have lived many different lives over the 14 years since I left university. Fundamentalist Christian, corporate hamster, mystical spiritual seeker (still seeking), solopreneur. Each of these shifts has brought with it new people and places. And the connections are so easily sustained in this digital world where the cost of communicating is zero.

Every morning I feel this resistance to turning my phone on. There’s always a handful of notifications, things to attend to, social engagements in the making. A backlog of WhatsApp messages that I haven’t answered linger.

I’m living in this paradox of wanting to be intimately connected to other people in strong community, and some days just feeling like I want to shut off from the world, become a hermit and live in a cave.

There’s too much input, too many points of connection, and my brain feels fried. I’ve turned off the double blue-tick read receipts, and the ability for people to see when I’m online. It’s the closest thing to a virtual cave.

And in the cave sits a terrified boy, still unsure if he actually belongs in the world, and if his friends really want to be his friends.

Because the truth is, I’m still figuring out how to show up as who I really am, and if that self is acceptable to my friends, old and new. So I hold others at arm’s length. I fear I can’t reciprocate their friendship. I fear they may ask too much from me; that they will reach out and ask for a coffee when my week is already full and I am unable to tend to all the things I want to do.

The boy wants relationships where catching up isn’t required. Where he doesn’t need to explain all that’s gone on in his life and mind. Where he can show up when joy is far from his orbit. Where he doesn’t have to hide the parts that physically ache, for fear of being too much, being a burden, or being rejected because his emotions and thought processes are too overwhelming.

As they have been explicitly stated to be by others.

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So back to WhatsApp, the message that causes my heart to drop:

“Hey Dario, how are you doing?”

Ah, an old friend who is genuinely interested in my well-being, but who represents another endpoint to my brain’s API that I haven’t serviced in a while.

What do I say?

“Oh just navigating my relationship with reality which has fundamentally shifted and trying to be kind to myself. Trying to say yes to life. Trying to love this existence, because it’s the only one I have.

If you were here, I would want to break down crying in your arms, without having to explain myself. Because I’m tired of explaining myself, and my tears are enough of an answer. I’m in the midst of digesting and releasing what feels like a lifetime of frustration and trying to figure it out, and I’m taking it one day at a time.

How about you?”