Everything is chat now

On high-speed replies and low-grade guilt.

I did something today that genuinely improved my mental health. Not yoga, not journaling, not screen time limits. I turned off read receipts in WhatsApp.

And weirdly? I feel great.

It’s only been a few hours, but I’ve realised how much of my anxiety was ambient. That low-level guilt of being just one notification behind on being a good friend, a good colleague, a good person. The blue tick isn’t just a feature — it’s an emotional contract. One you’re assumed to have agreed to. But that pressure? It’s a social contract I don’t remember signing.

And it’s not just WhatsApp. Everything is chat now. We date in DMs. We do our work in Slack, or Teams (my condolences). Even AI, this unparalleled world-changing technology, only really hit market fit when it became a chat interface.

We’ve accepted chat as the Tupperware in which we store all our relationships. Convenient, stackable, not ideal. Chat is quick but thin. It looks like conversation, but it mostly performs the role of keeping things alive.

There was a time when chat was the new thing. I remember going over to my friend Oran’s house just to go on MSN Messenger and talk to girls. We’d sit side by side, typing furiously. It felt electric.

I got my first real dopamine hits from a little pop-up in the corner of the screen. When the notification that my crush had just signed in popped up, my whole brain lit up.

It was a simpler time, and I do worry about today’s youth. For Gen Z, chat isn’t just a format, it’s a social frame. It’s escaped the chat window entirely, and pervaded daily life. You’ll see people start TikToks with “Chat, be honest” or “Chat, I can’t keep doing this.” It’s not about a literal group thread. It’s the imagined collective. The ambient audience.

At some point, “chat” stopped being the medium and became the message. And the message, increasingly, is: be on, be performing, be ready to reply. To borrow from the zoomer parlance, I think they might be cooked.

What chat makes up for in speed, it lacks in shape and memory. Compare that to its predecessors: email, or the grandaddy of them all, letters. And while it’s easy to deride letters as snail mail today, that wasn’t always the case. At its peak, the Royal Mail delivered up to twelve times a day in London.

I always look for letters in museums. Letters are a beautiful format: long enough to carry meaning, short enough to hold your attention. Intentional, personal, usually written with one person in mind. Even now, email still holds a bit of that weight. Salutations. Sign-offs. A couple of paragraphs. No one’s putting WhatsApp transcripts in a museum.

We’ve outsourced what little gravitas we had left to the quickest available interface. And that feels like a mistake.

Just to be clear, I’m really good at chat. I write in lowercase, I’m quick off the mark, I have a meme folder on my phone ready to go. And, for me, there is truly no better high than getting five laugh reacts in the work Slack.

If anything, I used to think WhatsApp was the white knight among the perils of social media. It felt intentional. Like MSN. A way to coordinate hangouts, not get trapped in an endless scroll hell. But even that’s a bit of a lie. It’s not intentional. It’s an ambient drip feed of engagement. A group hang with no eye contact. Scrolling through conversation-shaped notifications and calling it friendship.

So what do we do? Maybe we need a chat amnesty. Maybe all chats should only be available in the morning and evening, like postal deliveries. Maybe we all just need to bring back a bit of letter energy. Slower. Stranger. More considered. Less performative. I don’t have the answers. But I do know turning off read receipts has helped.

I’ve also started embracing phone calls again. Or just sending proper emails. There’s something clarifying about choosing a side — synchronous or asynchronous — instead of this weird in-between that chat forces us into. It’s like it’s trying to be both at once and ends up satisfying no one. We all feel the pressure of a live reply, without the benefit of a real-time conversation.

And maybe the weirdest part is how we’ve taken the most powerful new technology in decades — AI — and stuffed it into what is effectively a chat window from the early 2000s. That can’t be the end state. I think we’re past peak chat. And what comes next might actually be better. I hope it is.

Chat, be honest. Are we cooked?

[This is part of my ‘every day in May’ series: unpolished writing, published daily.]