A Tale of Two Blue Ticks
Have you ever felt annoyed by a blue tick? Looking at your orphaned message again and again, constructing reasons for the other to not to reply, wondering if anything went wrong, and yet hurt by the longing. The feeling might get heavier. It’s like a kid dropping stones to a deep well, you are thrilled each time when the darkness echoes, and then, magically, you can’t hear anything. You are curious ‘what’s down there? A water monster from your bedtime stories? You are curious, yet afraid to throw another stone… And your fantasies settle in there, deep down in the darkness of the well.
Does it really have to be so? My dad used to tell me how he used to send postal letters, and sometimes no replies. Or he never waited for replies because he never knew if the other person read it or not. Sending letters through centuries, from trained doves to postal service, we are becoming more certain about the message reaching the other, uninterrupted. And yet, we are not sure if the other actually read the message. A gesture from the returning dove, a confirmation from the postal office, and our blue ticks; all these just say your message has reached, nothing more. We got a postal letter once in a while and got to see a messenger dove very rarely. But now we are drowning in a clutter of messages; a thick soup of information. Now it’s important to know that it’s okay to have orphaned messages and it’s totally fine to gift your bestie careless blue ticks. When the notification tones start to resemble our heartbeats, we know that the race for reciprocation has turned us all into anxious creatures.
Evolution talks about ancient humans’ anxieties. An abundance of adrenaline kept them alert against speedy predators, crawling creatures, and all sorts of threats that closely enveloped their very existence. Our journey through civilizations gradually kept us apart from those imminent and fatal threats — but evolution didn’t drain those hormones out of our bodies. The modern man still feels threatened, but confused more than ever — where is the threat? We have adapted to imagine threats around us, and coloring our fantasies with gloom, the raise of modernity becomes the raise of deep-rooted anxiety.
Interestingly, the digital giants make use of your fantasies to bind you forever as a ‘user’. Each notification makes you feel anxious. Triggering the curiosity, it makes you check your phone recurrently. An ancient cave-woman might have done the same — recurrent checking of the surroundings because carelessness costs her life. Science says each positive notification comes with a dopamine shot which makes you feel good. To sustain the good feel, you need more dopamine which means more notifications. Your anxiety grows in search of more messages but what you see is an orphaned message — those unreciprocated blue ticks make you panic. Cave-human was anxious about whether he’ll get food for the day or not, but now the modern man is anxious whether he’ll get a reply to his message or not. The comparison might look silly, but both we and our ancestors have the same mechanism of anxiety, and perhaps we have the same level of anxiety too.
Okay so let’s leave the science lecture there — what’s the point? Shall we agree it’s okay to be ‘unreciprocated’ that there’s no emotional or ethical commitment to reply to every message? The world will look a bit better than, don’t you think? I have a friend. We have a strange texting pattern. We never respond quickly, we never panic about the delay, and we took our time to think and carefully compose each message — days, weeks, or even longer. It was beautiful; we never waited for a response and we always knew it’s okay not to respond as well as not to get a response. For us, blue ticks were cute little reminders that deprived us out of all anxieties. Orphaned messages trained us to look at the world better. Why can’t we all try to cultivate that mindset? Each of us saying ‘I am okay with it’ will be like lightening one lamp of happiness from each one’s side, don’t you think!?
