Yesterday, I got an invitation to birthday drinks from a college friend. Great! As I read her WhatsApp, my eyes drifted up my phone screen to what sat above it: a stream of voice notes. All unplayed. Some two months old.
I have three friends who send them, and I do mean to listen, but like opening that pile of post on the stairs or renewing my mortgage, they nag at the back of my brain… and yet still I do nothing.
There are dozens of voice notes sitting unread on my phone. As soon as I see one, my heart starts racing, I feel cornered and instantly anxious. Why are they doing this, I think? Why don’t they want to talk to me?
These friends are all lovely and unlikely to be self-indulgent, plus their notes are mercifully short. I have little reason to be scared. But I am.
Much of my anguish centres on how I reply. Surely we should always respond in kind, so I send a voice note back? Never! I begin to fear I’m exhibiting boomer behaviour here and resolve to get over it.
Voice notes aren’t exactly new. It’s a decade since the feature to send little audio clips, rather than just emoji-infested texts, was added to iPhones. WhatsApp, which introduced voice notes in 2013, estimates that 7 billion are sent every day. Now, there’s a generation that seems able only to communicate via them.
But, in what amounts to an admission of failure, WhatsApp have revealed a new feature which will turn the most rambling audio message into text. So now, not only will I not have to listen to a voice note, I can ignore the accompanying screed, too. My concern is that the audio-to-text facility will only encourage people to leave more voice notes.
I message my nieces, nephews, and the offspring of friends, mainly Gen-Zers, to ask if they’ve embraced the voice note and for any advice. Responses range from “I use them all the time. I love hearing the tone of voice and personality of my friends,” to “I refuse to listen, it only encourages them.”
A nephew comments that it tends to be overexcited mates who use them to talk about themselves (“They need to get a podcast”), while a teenager says he listens to them on double speed to get to any point. Another recommends that I use them only to send important information in a hurry, but says she always starts with “Sorry about the voice note...”
Hardly a ringing endorsement, that, is it?
I am pleased to see the young aren’t united on this divisive habit. A gym buddy launches into a defence of voice notes (or “VNs”, as she insists on calling them). Her friend lives in New York and they use them like letters, sending long VNs to each other every week or so. Well, that does sound lovely. But I suspect none of my unheard messages are similar.
She can’t understand my hatred of them: “They’re just answerphone messages!” But they’re not: those people wanted to speak to me. Leave me a voice message and I’ll listen to it, happily. Voice notes are a one-sided conversation, the sender has switched to “send” mode and blocked any receive. And it makes me feel ambushed.
Hang on, I did enjoy a voice note once, and it was five minutes long. A mate was going through a juicy family drama. So I listened. The details of that fateful day, the aftermath, and his dry comments were tantamount to a stand-up routine. I loved it. But this is unlikely to happen often.
So I remain unconvinced. There are ways to mitigate the impact of an unwanted voice note. Set a two-minute limit rule with friends. When one lands, listen to them right away and send a thumbs up in reply – or an “I’m sorry, I can’t do voice notes,” and hope they’ll stop.
Or do as I’m doing, and leave them unread. They’ll soon get the message.
