When it comes to texting, I'm an old soul. I'm the type of person that prefers handwritten letters or face-to-face conversations rather than a few typed out words on a screen. But, I didn't always feel this way about texting. There was a time when I would text friends every day simply because I could.
Thinking back to middle school, most of my text conversations were plain, simple and boring. Almost all of them looked like this:
"Hey."
"Hi."
"What's up?"
"Not much, you?"
"Same."
(Obviously the punctuation and grammar were way worse, and I rarely typed out full words; but I couldn't bring myself to type the way I did as an adolescent 13-year-old without cringing.)
Around the time that I was having conversations like these, it didn't really seem to matter what we talked about, as long as we talked. It became routine for me to stay in constant communication with friends because I felt like if I didn't then we would lose that friendship. That was what technology did to me. It made me feel like I had to keep my friends in the loop 24/7 or I would miss something.
Texting has made it extremely easy to reach out to someone and find out how they're doing within seconds, but at the same time, it's also had repercussions that don't add any positive value to our lives. One example would be the amount of times I've witnessed people become paranoid because they haven't received a text back, and it's been 30 minutes since they sent theirs. Or the amount of times text messages get read differently than we intended, and it backfires and causes an argument.
Things have changed drastically since my middle school days. Over the last few years, I've had very few full-blown conversations with someone via text messages. But even then, most of those conversations were with my mom, and they were just me ranting and her responding hours later.
I could probably count on my hands the amount of times I've had a full texting conversation with my best friends. That doesn't mean that I don't care about them or staying in contact with them, and I'm lucky enough to have best friends who realize that. They understand that I don't really like texting, and they'll probably tell you that I suck at texting anyways, but they at least know that I still care about them even if I don't converse with them every single day.
To be completely honest, sending a few words here and there doesn't seem like a real conversation to me. That's probably why I'm notorious for sending paragraphs to people when I do text, yet I'll often receive a few words in response. Those responses leave me feeling like you don't care about what I have to say and instead are simply typing out a half-assed response as you move on with more important things in your life.
Having conversations with friends via texting every single day means I always know what's going on in their lives. At some point, it takes away the fun in finally catching up over coffee or lunch, and those are the memories that I cherish, the authentic human connections we make with one another, not the text messages that we rush to type out as we move on with our lives.
