The group chat is the new second shift. I’m turning in my resignation.

Remember in the 90s when a hard copy school newsletter was sent home with the eldest sibling in every family once a week? It would be stuffed into the school bag on a Friday afternoon and either be retrieved or left to mingle with the half-eaten apple and syrupy juice box residue until it became a claggy mould monster.

In this earlier, simpler time, it was also normal for people to call each other on the phone, to post messages on community pin boards in earnest and to go to the doctor for medical issues rather than uploading a picture and a question mark to Reddit.

These days, information is both more accessible and abundant, and communication is more targeted and direct. Algorithms, based entirely on the attention we give a particular video, photo or advertisement dictate what social media we consume, which in turn determines whether we become fascists or not. Anyway, my point is, where once we looked to relatively static institutions to understand the world and for practical information about elections and imminent storms, we are now at the mercy of our phones and tech overlords. And as for the micro concerns of the day (like every-child-must- every-child-must-bring-a-glass-jar-to-school-with-no-explanation situations), we turn to that interloper into our blessed information silos – the group chat.

Is it time to ghost your group chat?Credit: Getty Images

Now, before I start complaining too much, I do want to say that there are some group chats that I feel quite privileged to be a part of. These are the ones where the conversation is relevant, the gifs are only from Arrested Development/The Simpsons and everyone understands sarcasm. But there are a whole lot where none of this is the case, and these are the chats that are getting to me. They are the threads that are too big, where the conversation is so regular that posting and replying have become a chore, and where positivity has evolved into toxic positivity until everyone is typing with gritted teeth and fake smiles.

I appreciate that I probably sound a little uptight about this tool, this creator of community and oracle of things I should probably be aware of. But I have a lot of kids and I’m in about 16 different chats relating to their various classes, old classes and year levels, as well as the whole student body of a primary school. In addition, there are the family threads, breakaway family threads where my husband gets excluded because he’s too chipper, and friendship group threads. In short, there are too many and I’m getting tired.

We recently had an old friend leave a long-standing friendship chat without explanation. Now, of course, this stung but part of me is also sympathetic to the dude who mic-dropped his way out of there. Group chats have created an untenable, indeed crushing, amount of emotional labour that did not exist a generation ago. When communication was person-to-person, there was a finite period in the day when one was required to receive and respond to contact from the outside world. Now we are on a 24-hour cycle of link shares, memes, complaints and queries. This is particularly the case when one is receiving updates from family threads, friendship group threads, breakaway friendship group threads and “does anyone else find X from high school annoying” threads. Each of these microcosms is now its own village in which one is expected to demonstrate civic responsibility at any time of day or night.

That’s right. In creating these thousands of micro communities we have also created the obligation of posting, reading and then calibrating an appropriate response across too many different sections of life. And I don’t think I’m alone in this. I now feel as though half the chat notifications I get are just people acknowledging receipt via a love heart or thank you hands.

There is also the emotional work of being constantly “on”. Depending on the chat and its members, in addition to posting and replying, you must also contend with the worry that a joke post will be taken seriously, or a meme post you thought was legitimately funny will be completely ignored.

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Perhaps it is these dual stressors that have led so many people towards passive aggression? Surely I am not the only one who puts their phone down to make a coffee and comes back to a home screen with 40+ notifications, most of which are snarking on the person-who-could-have-Googled with things like, “I find diarising this straight away helps😊” and “Have you tried scrolling up?😉”

So, while I’m not calling for the death of the group chat I am calling for a cull. Let’s remove a little of our out-of-hours work and spare ourselves the panic, the obligation and the frustration. Like the creation of the internet itself, these chats were started with the best of intentions but have become weighed down by exhaustion, over proliferation and AI slop – the digital iteration of the fruit and newsletter combo.

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