Though my internal age is set to about 28, the time when I feel profoundly 43 is when I get nostalgic for things rendered obsolete by technology. One of those things was being able to go on holiday without being continually contacted, because the price of sending a text message was the same as a glass of wine. WhatsApp has obliterated that.
Over the past year, I’ve noticed how much harder it has been to switch off as a result of the incessant flow of information. I have walked in the Polish countryside foraging for mushrooms under a crisp blue sky, while listening to a friend’s voice note about their work worries in minute detail. After I spent a glorious day out with my 10-year-old niece in Barcelona, eating dumplings and buying stickers, a friend decided to share a non-urgent but emotionally difficult update about a mutual friend’s bad health. While I was in the Maldives, after I had watched a stingray glide below me in a cobalt-blue ocean, a cousin sent me a rundown of a date where the guy had sneezed all over her food.
Unlike social media and email apps, which can be temporarily deleted, WhatsApp is the dominant method that many of us use to communicate with our loved ones. Deleting it even while on holiday doesn’t feel like an option, when people use it to convey important information alongside everyday dross. And in any case, the problem isn’t the app itself; it’s the fact that being available 24/7 means we have lost our sense of boundaries in terms of what to communicate and when.
“Just don’t reply, what’s the big deal?” said a friend who is notoriously bad at replying to messages. Some people are good at being able to not check messages, to rest comfortably in the discomfort of not replying. But for people-pleasers and codependents – even reformed ones such as myself – trying to create those boundaries can make you feel like a terrible person. It’s not just about self-imposed pressure, but the subtext of what not replying says.
Previously you could blame your silence on high phone tariffs or a lack of signal, but given the ubiquity of free hotel wifi, now a non-response suggests you don’t care, or that you have better things to do. (Admittedly, both might be true.) However, as someone who struggles with anxiety, it’s not just the endless stream of information that I find difficult to compartmentalise. It’s the expectation that I should reply immediately.
Recently, on a girls’ trip to Greece, we talked about how different our preferences were around being contacted while on holiday. One of the group chatted to her partner several times a day, while I said that was my idea of a nightmare. “I’m actually trialling a voice notes and video notes ban while on this trip,” I said. Why would you want to do such a thing, they asked.
I explained that I had tried a number of tactics to give myself space. I had turned off read receipts because being visibly online felt very exposing, similar to sitting in my undies at home with the lights on, with a parade of people walking past and ringing the doorbell just because I appeared to be in. Turning off notifications came shortly afterwards and it dramatically reduced the amount of mental noise.
But recently I’ve had to gently talk to friends – particularly the ones who send voice notes or download the details of their day – about not sending me non-urgent messages while I’m away, because there have been too many times when they simply haven’t understood that I’m on holiday and therefore not accessible. This mainly applies to short trips when the window to decompress is tighter; and while I can text back occasionally, I would rather not receive messages that require a lengthy response or feel like an emotional dump.
One friend laughed and said: “I’m never going to remember that”, which is fine because expecting other people to remember my social calendar is not a realistic expectation. What feels important in the process is knowing that I’ve played an active role in communicating what I need. Another was confused about why I was doing it, and whether there were loopholes.
“But what if something pops into my head while you’re away?” a third friend asked. I replied that I was not a recording device, and that unless it was an emergency, it could wait until I got back. I’ve found that sometimes when you set a boundary, people perceive it as a rejection of them, so I made sure to underline that this was about how I was trying to switch off more effectively.
It doesn’t matter whether we are physically leaving the country or holidaying at home. For those of us who can’t afford to go away over the festive season, this period of quiet may be the closest thing we have to a break, and the same rules can still apply.
Though we are getting better at knowing how to prioritise rest, there is still an unwieldy focus on the individual to shape their environment to enable this. We can do a digital detox and disable notifications, but short of leaving our phones at home – which is not a possibility as a single female – asking our loved ones to consider the role they play in helping us to recover and recuperate is critical.
Poorna Bell is a freelance journalist and author of Chase the Rainbow
