Ghosts of Group Chats

I put in some thought and realise there is an easier way out – reduce the number of chats currently featured in my WhatsApp inbox – and boom, the backup storage space clears up too! Why had I not thought of this before?

I open WhatsApp, a determined woman on a mission, and scroll right till the end. I make the conscious decision of working my way up from the bottom. This approach, after all, has helped me in my career – it certainly cannot fail with a simple messaging service.

The bottom is heavy with empty group chats. ‘XYZ’s 30th Birthday Plans‘ (XYZ will turn 35 this year!), ‘Lunch Plan – 13 July 2021‘ (celebrating its 5th anniversary already!), ‘Jungle trip next‘ (is a plan in the making for over a decade!) and so on. I fondly marvel how these groups (and by that, I mean the group dynamics) have survived despite no active participation. I open them with a lingering half smile, only to discover that I am the ‘last man standing’.

The ‘Exit and Delete’ is naturally, quick and painless.

But then up come the ‘full attendance’ groups – where no one has typed a single message in three years, yet everyone refuses to leave. The reasoning is logical (let’s not call them excuses just yet!) : An address sent across I might be in need of; a trip down memory lane on a breezy summer night; or perhaps the name of a colleague’s child that must be casually dropped during conversation. Yet those chats know just as well as I do – there’s no going back.

I need to stay true to my mission though – so I manage to delete some personal and some group chats along the way. And that’s when the ‘main character’ of this dilemma makes its grand entrance – a group chat of my closest, oldest friends.

Once my life and soul, this group has survived its way through teenage and early adulthood. Never constantly online but oh, the conversations when we all managed to shake the group alive! The range was immense – from sharing location updates to life updates, from book suggestions to new mobile phone recommendations, from intense debates to lazy board games being planned and played offline and online. Somehow though, we collectively lost the race against the prime years of our adulthood. And so today that group pings but rarely. The cohesiveness that once was, is overshadowed by the silence that envelops the group chat. It remains inactive, not yet pronounced dead.

I played the ‘updater’ a couple of weeks ago in this very group chat. Something interesting I had come across, hoping to wake up the sleeping dragons of our past conversations. But this turned out to be a fantasy just as real as those dragons. Till date, 2 out of 4 have seen my message. Only 1 of them has managed a response.

Now, a practical mind would immediately bring up images of adults simply surviving the eternal rat race of ‘I just don’t have enough time’ that is the norm of the 21st century. But my brain decided otherwise – it took a dramatic leap and immediately told me that these friends of mine hate me and I am being ghosted for not being interesting enough anymore.

Should I confront them? No, perhaps the more decisive way of letting them know is to Exit and Delete the group. I am aware that adult friendships naturally drift, but currently I am in the throes of digital overthinking to comprehend this logic.