If you don't get your messages back, relax.

If we don't feel safe about the work we have, about our contract to buy, when we're going to retire or what the fate of the planet will be, at least we can close up on ourselves and decide exactly who we're going to let into our lives and when, if we do, we're going to put in contact.

According to a cliche, we already live in the era of “instant communication”. But that is not the case. We live in an era where instant communication is possible so we can immediately get an answer on email, text, or chat, but in reality, it often doesn't happen. Sometimes days or even weeks pass before someone answers an email or a message.

“Resultate”, recently written Julie Beck in The Atlantic “is the feeling that, if they wanted, everyone would immediately respond to us and the anxiety that comes when they don't do it”. In the past, immediate answers were forced (such as in an eye - to - eye conversation) or impossible (such as regular mail). Today, we tend to confuse both. So when the answer does not come, we do not know what to think.

This explains the typical modern feeling, as if we are constantly in emotional awkward situations that may actually exist only in our mind.

Obedience Without Evidence

Right now, for example, I am convinced that a dear friend of mine is angry or painful because I have not yet responded to the news message he sent me before Christmas. And that a person at work who had proposed to go out one day for lunch, after my enthusiastic response, was no longer made alive, perhaps because he realized that he had confused me with a more important person than I am, and he is ashamed to admit it.

Of course, I don't have the slightest proof of either of these two beliefs: maybe my friend didn't put any weight on this thing, and that the person at work at the moment is very busy, and sooner or later, he'll answer. There's a particular, lonely madness in experimenting with a tension situation, with people almost certainly not sharing their experiences with us.

But this anxiety, notes Beck, is the price we're willing to pay to experience that sense of control, which allows us not to be forced to respond immediately: “the innovation of the instant communication age is that it allows us to manage conversations like we want”. If more and more people consider a phone call to be, as a type of “cris” since (God!) it may be that we should respond immediately because in other sectors it is difficult to feel this sense of control.

If we don't feel safe about the work we have, about our contract to buy, when we're going to retire or what the fate of the planet will be, at least we can close up on ourselves and decide exactly who we're going to let into our lives and when, if we do, we're going to put in a touch.

The problem is that the disadvantages of this kind of control can be completed by overcoming the advantages. A world in which we have no obligations towards anyone is also a world in which no one has any obligation to us.

I may be convinced that I prefer to choose that when I respond to my friend's message, but what really happens is that he gets in the middle of a job, push the answer to the infinite, and another thread of that friendship gets broken. If he had called me, and I had answered, we could have avoided him.

And I would have saved myself weeks of guilt that I had offended him, even though he probably never noticed. / The Guardian World.al