As I write, I have 101 unread WhatsApp messages, 254 unread iPhone messages and 46,252 unread emails across three separate accounts. For me, Inbox Zero is a faraway goal, as unachievable as mastering the perfect cat’s-eye flick, or learning how to cook.
But it is the WhatsApp messages, specifically the WhatsApp group chats, that terrorise me the most. If I were a woman of courage, I would simply exit these chats as soon as I am added to them; but I feel the weight of social obligation, and so I remain.
I am not the only person to feel this way. Last month, WhatsApp bowed to public pressure, and announced that users will be able to exit groups invisibly, without notifying other members of their decision. (The new policy has yet to be implemented, however.) The conflict-avoidant among us rejoiced: now, finally, we can slink out of groups without being perceived as rude. But 11 years after the instant messaging app introduced a group chat feature, will we ever truly escape the tyranny of the WhatsApp group?
“I am probably on the wrong side of history on this,” says Danny Groner, 39, a marketing director from New York. “Just to be clear. It’s not about my cousins. They are lovely people.” Groner is referring to a 25-strong WhatsApp group consisting of his first and second cousins. It is a space to keep up with family news: birthdays, anniversaries, births, new jobs. “Everyone is well-meaning,” says Groner. “But I wasn’t getting any value out of it.”
Groner has left the group three times. Each time, a cousin has added him back in, usually to wish him a happy birthday or happy anniversary, and Groner has gone straight back out again, without thanking them.
“I’m sure people in the group think it’s aggressive, or strange at the very least,” he says. “But I need to uphold these boundaries for myself, so I don’t get sucked in.”
Instead, Groner has hit on a workable compromise, at least for him: his wife monitors the group on his behalf. “She is willing to sacrifice herself to be a part of it,” he says, “because it doesn’t bother her in the way it does me.” Although Groner is often told that he is rude, he is also an unlikely hero for the WhatsApp group resistance: “I have so many people telling me that they wish they could get out of groups, but they’re afraid they’ll offend people if they leave.”
In effect, Groner has asserted his desire to live without being assailed by incessant messages that require immediate responses. “I just can’t live a life these days where I come back to my phone and have several dozen messages to sift through,” he explains. In this, he is exercising what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze describes as “the right to say nothing”. Deleuze writes: “Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves, but rather force them to express themselves; what a relief to have nothing to say. Because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and even rarer, thing that might be worth saying.”
Although Deleuze died before social media took off, the phenomenon he observed – how pointless chatter takes us away from the conversations that really matter – could easily be applied to any fast-flashing WhatsApp group. These chats reduce us all to an army of modern-day Mrs Bennets, endlessly gossiping or swapping mundane observations, rather than working, thinking, or simply existing.
“Take an executive overview of how WhatsApp is eating into your life,” says Richard Seymour, author of The Twittering Machine. “The basic thing it does is colonise and eat away at bits of your attention here and there, until gradually it starts to occupy a bigger and bigger part of it. Think about what you can be doing in that time. There is something to be said for the idea that not everything needs to be responded to, or deserves a response.”
For many, WhatsApp group chats began infiltrating their time like Japanese knotweed during the Covid-19 pandemic. “Covid made WhatsApp far more important,” says Dr Tali Gazit, a lecturer in information science at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. “We couldn’t get out of the house, but we could have communities inside our phones.”
Once the pandemic died down, however, the chats took on a different role. During the first lockdown, Amal, 21, a retail assistant from Birmingham, formed a 12-person WhatsApp group with friends from college. After things returned to normal, she says, the group chat fizzled out. “Everyone got back to being busy,” Amal says. “But there were two people in the group who just couldn’t come to grips with it … It was a big thing for them.”
These friends, says Amal, became fixated with her. They kept changing the name of the group chat to “Hello Amal” or “We Miss You Amal” in an attempt to get her attention. At first, Amal found the changes funny, if odd. But then “they came into my workplace,” she says, and asked her if she wanted to come out for a drink. “It was confusing. I hadn’t spoken to them properly in weeks.” Amal declined, and left the WhatsApp group shortly afterwards. When she reflects on this experience, what she sees is “a sense of entitlement … people have different interpretations of what it means to communicate, and their expectations of communication from a WhatsApp group.”
Seymour says that WhatsApp is as addictive as other social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter. “One thing WhatsApp has in common with these platforms is transience,” he says, “meaning that you have to respond quickly. Otherwise what you want to say is lost in the flow, particularly with fast-moving conversations. That pressure to respond quickly and to be concise, to be witty, to grandstand, to showboat – that is very powerful.”
He cites the anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll’s concept of the “machine zone”, a trance-like state observed in casino gamblers who become entranced by the whirring and flashing of slot machines. “These machines regulate your emotions and give you losses designed as wins. WhatsApp does something similar,” says Seymour. Each notification rewards users with a tiny dopamine spike, locking us back into our smartphones, oblivious to the passage of time. “All these platforms are structured around user engagement to maximise the production of data,” says Seymour. “WhatsApp wants you to be constantly logging in. Even if the loss is only that you spend much of your day in this distracted mode, think about what other enjoyment or pleasures you could be having in your life.”
Extracting yourself from these group chats can feel like being in a shallow but particularly vicious surf: every time you try to tear yourself away, you are knocked off your feet. Gazit explains that this is similar to a real-world phenomenon: the fear of missing out.
“We know this is harmful,” she says. “You’re constantly informed about what’s going on, and for a short while this may decrease your social anxiety, but in the long run, your anxiety is only going to grow. It seems like Meta [WhatsApp’s parent company] knows this, which is why they use the alerts, as they feed our Fomo.”
“Our attention spans have become like that of a mayfly,” says Irene, a 41-year-old marketing strategist from London. “The chats are fun for a bit, but when you’re trying to get on with stuff, it’s like: ‘Dude, leave me alone!’ This is just mind clutter. It is input that isn’t going anywhere.”
In 2019, Irene’s friend asked her if she would be willing to coordinate an 80-person WhatsApp group on her behalf. It consisted of people from Germany and the UK, all attending the friend’s wedding. Irene recalls: “She said, can you make sure that if people talk about gifts, nothing doubles up? And can you also make sure people don’t plan any silly games, because we hate that?”
Irene, appalled, refused. “I thought: I cannot fathom doing this. This will kill me. Just being in this WhatsApp group will kill me. But having to be the admin, and police stuff?” Her friend was upset. “I think she was quite pissed off with me,” says Irene. “Ultimately, it’s fine. It didn’t kill our friendship. But I think she thought that would be an act of service that I should really do for her. And I didn’t feel I could do that.”
Irene, at least, had the fortitude to refuse her friend’s request outright. For Claudia, a 32-year-old stay-at-home parent from Kent, such candour was inconceivable. She joined a group chat for parents she had met through an antenatal class while pregnant with her first child in 2014, but quickly found the group irritating. “There was a bit of competition there,” she says. “One person would say she was struggling with breastfeeding, and another lady would chime in and say: ‘I’m finding it really easy.’”
As Claudia did not feel she could simply leave the group without social awkwardness, she told everyone she was leaving it because her dyslexia made it impossible to keep up with all the messages. Claudia is not dyslexic. “I hate confrontation,” she says apologetically.
The pressure to dissemble in social situations is strong, and this is why Gazit welcomes the new WhatsApp feature. “It should have been obvious from the beginning that notifying people when someone leaves a group harms their privacy,” she says. “Because everyone can see you are leaving the group, and a lot of people don’t want to leave because of that, because they feel it creates drama around them.” For those seeking to exit a quarrelsome group without social fallout, Gazit advises: “If you can leave the group quietly, I think that’s for the best.” Seymour suggests users who do remain switch off notifications on their WhatsApp chats. “Drop in once in a while,” he says. “Don’t take it seriously. Refuse to respond to obvious bait.”
It is worth remembering that WhatsApp, if used in moderation, can play a positive role in connecting people. “The world has become more lonely,” says Gazit, “and virtual communities can be solutions to the loneliness people feel.” Her research shows that those who belong to family WhatsApp groups typically have better wellbeing than those who don’t. She herself is an enthusiastic user. “I am a member of a WhatsApp group of mums who just had a new baby,” Gazit says. “I don’t know them personally, but we discuss the issue of new motherhood, they support me when I need, and we exchange information. It’s great. Virtual groups can be very powerful.”
And of course, they are tremendously useful. “If something needs to be coordinated,” Irene says, “I’d set up a WhatsApp group for that specific reason. But I’d delete it afterwards. OK, we’ve organised this weekend away. The weekend is over! Goodbye.”
Seymour urges users to put their phones down and step out into the real world. “These platforms create a spurious intimacy,” he says. “It can feel like you are talking to your friends, but that is not what happens at all. You are talking to a machine. The machine takes a copy of your message, and passes it on, and you have a conversation on the terms of the machine. Perhaps people may wish to consider withdrawing their labour from that exchange, and only using it when they want and need to. Use WhatsApp for personal conversations, and keeping up with friends. But don’t let it damage your life.”
Because although it can feel like WhatsApp group chats are substitutes for human contact, in effect what we’re really doing is smacking back conversations as if volleyed at us by a tennis-ball machine. It fires, we respond, and the hours pass. We do not have to engage with these attention-devouring devices. We – all of us – can simply put down our rackets, and walk away.
• Some names have been changed.
