Group Chat Fatigue Is Real

It was a Tuesday around eight. I’d just closed the laptop after a long day mostly spent inside other people’s faces in small rectangles, with Slack on a second monitor and the kind of low hum across the workday that you only notice when it stops. The kitchen was quiet. I poured a glass of water and picked up my phone. Forty-seven unread in the group chat with old colleagues. I scrolled for four minutes — a meme about Mondays, three different reactions to the meme, a link to someone’s Substack post, a screenshot of a CrossFit time. I closed the app and sat at the table feeling, oddly, more alone than before I opened it.

I want to be careful with that word. I don’t mean lonely-as-tragedy. I mean the specific small flatness of having spent a few minutes “with” people you like and arriving back at yourself with nothing actually changed.

The fatigue isn’t the volume. It’s the shape.

The standard read on group chats is that they’re noisy and exhausting because there are too many of them, or because they pulse with unread badges that never fully clear. I don’t think that’s it, at least not for me. I get the same fatigue from chats that have been quiet for days. Something else is going on. Most of what arrives in a group chat demands a response without ever asking a question.

Think about what actually flows through the average chat over a week. Logistics (“11am works”). Reactions: the thumbs-up, the heart, the laughing emoji. Links and forwards. A photo of someone’s dog. A meme. Maybe a sentence of news. These are signals of presence; I’m here, I see you, and they have real value. But none of them carry the structure of a real question, the kind that arrives, slows you down, and asks you to write something that isn’t a reply but an answer.

After a workday already shaped entirely by inputs that demand outputs (the meeting that needs a summary, the message that needs a thumbs-up, the email that needs a response), picking up the phone and finding more inputs that need outputs is just more of the same job. The medium changes. The shape doesn’t.

What I think we actually want at the end of a screen day

If you work in front of a screen most of the day, by evening your body is doing something specific: it has run out of the ordinary kind of attention. Not energy in the cardiovascular sense, but the quieter kind that lets you read a paragraph without your eyes sliding off the page. Anna Lembke, who runs Stanford’s addiction medicine clinic, has written about what overstimulated attention does to baseline mood. It pushes the brain into a state where anything moving more slowly than the feed feels dim. A book, a friend’s voicemail, a partner asking a real question. They start feeling like effort.

That is the bind. The conversation that actually feeds you runs slower than the feed, so when you’re tired, you reach for the thing that runs at feed speed. The group chat runs at feed speed. The candy runs at feed speed. What you actually need that evening is a meal, but the candy is closer to your hand and asks less of you to unwrap.

I’m not the first to notice this. The 2023 US Surgeon General’s advisory on loneliness made the strange-sounding case that connection has become a public health issue not because we’re more isolated in the obvious sense (most of us are reachable around the clock) but because the quality of contact has shifted. Sherry Turkle at MIT put the same observation more sharply almost a decade ago: we have, she wrote, sacrificed conversation for mere connection. The diagnosis hasn’t aged. It’s gotten worse, because the medium has become more frictionless and the workday has crept further into the room.

The honest pushback

This is where I have to be careful, because I don’t actually believe memes are empty. When my cousin sends a forwarded video of a dog wearing sunglasses, that’s not nothing. It’s a small, specific signal that says I saw this, I thought of you, I wanted you to know. People I love communicate that way and it would be snobbish to pretend the warmth isn’t real. Plenty of nights I don’t have the energy for a real conversation either, and a meme is what I can give. I don’t want a friend to read that as a refusal.

The honest version of what I’m saying is subtler: candy is enough when there’s also a meal. The chat with my brothers is full of memes too, but somewhere in any given month one of us will ask the actual question: how is dad doing, how are you sleeping, did the thing at work resolve. The memes ride on top of that infrastructure, and they read as warmth because there’s warmth underneath. In the chats where the real question never arrives, the memes still arrive, but they sit on nothing. After a while you notice you’ve been “in touch” with a group for two years without anyone in it learning anything new about you.

A different shape

This is part of why we built Colloquies around a single weekly question instead of a feed. It isn’t a replacement for any of the chats already on your phone. Keep the brothers, keep the moms, keep the weekend group. Think of it as a separate room with a different shape. Once a week, a real question lands. Everyone answers privately, then the answers reveal together. There’s no race for the first reaction, no one has to be the person keeping the chat alive, and the structure does the quiet work that, in the old days, the standing Thursday at the pub or the Sunday call to a parent used to do.

We wrote about that idea more in the living room metaphor: the friendships that survive aren’t the ones with the most messages. They’re the ones with a room of their own.

What I’m sitting with

I closed the chat that Tuesday and didn’t go back to it for a while. I didn’t quit it; I just put the phone down. A week later one of the people in it called me, unprompted, to ask how I was doing after a thing he’d remembered I had going on. We were on the phone for forty minutes. It cost more than a thumbs-up, and it gave back something the chat hadn’t given me in months.

I keep thinking about why the call worked. It wasn’t that he asked a profound question. He asked a small one. It was that the question expected a real answer, and didn’t expect it inside the next ninety seconds. The shape was different.

After a long day at a screen, the message that actually feels like food is the one that asks something and then lets you take your time with the answer. The technology delivering it matters less than that. What matters is whether the message has the shape of a real question, or just the shape of one more thing to react to.

Hero image by gaspar zaldo on Unsplash.