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I saw a TikTok recently, a quick 15-second burst of opinion and urgency, where someone declared that if they don’t receive a reply within a couple of days, they cut people off.
It was said with conviction, a resolute insistence on standards of responsiveness, and part of me understood.
In a world where we’re constantly available, why should anyone wait for an answer?
And yet, the pressure of that sentiment lingered uncomfortably in my mind, like a weight pressing against my chest.
Digital availability insists on a kind of constant presence without depth. We exist in this strange, in-between space, always tethered to our devices, available but not truly present. What once felt like an opportunity—instant connection, endless access—has become a quiet kind of burden, an unrelenting sense of being needed. Each ping and flashing icon asks us not just to respond but to be perpetually reachable, always on standby for the next request for our time, our attention.
It begins innocuously enough, the subtle shifts: a text we read but don’t immediately reply to, a notification we swipe away with the promise of answering later. But later never comes easily, and the anxiety mounts—because a delay in response now implies something more.
Care is measured by reply time, love becomes a transaction of speed. We find ourselves haunted by it, the expectation that connection should mean immediacy—that we owe each other constant, unfailing access.
And so, the idea from that TikTok—of cutting people off if they don’t respond quickly enough—feels emblematic of our times. We have confused urgency with intimacy, mistaking rapid replies for the presence that real relationships require. But what space do we leave for the slowness of life? For the moments when we are simply too tired, too distracted, or too caught up in our own small worlds to send back a message?
The demand for instant replies doesn’t just request a response; it asks for our fractured, overextended presence, even when we have so little to give.
It is a curious kind of erosion, this pressure to always be available—a slow, invisible wearing down of our solitude, of the grace we used to give each other for being delayed, distracted…human.
Digital availability was meant to bring us closer, but now it quietly asks us to sacrifice our peace, to live half in the world of our devices and half in the world unfolding around us.
Always reachable, but perhaps more lost than ever.
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