The late reply and the apology: a moral tale from the 21st century

Why do some of us keep apologising when we don't reply to a text instantly? When we were legimitally busy, or not in the right mood to answer a few messages? With messaging apps almost all displaying when we’re active or not and the brain and hand extension that has become our mobile phone, it is sometimes difficult for certain people to not apologise when taking longer than a few hours to answer a friend or even just an acquaintance.

Yes, okay, of course: there’s a category of people who will apologise when getting back to you JUST to emphasize on how busy they are and how way worse their job is and how much more stuff they have to do daily – and basically how extremely fascinating and active their life is in comparison to yours. Let’s forget about these ones. Not the ones we’re talking about today, although we might someday deal with them in another article. No, today we’re talking about the ones – including me – who live with a sort of constant fear and stress of answering too late, of offending friends because they were sleeping, working, cooking, had forgotten about a text and didn’t answer it right away. We’re talking about the ones who always start a conversation by saying “Hey – sorry for the late answer” / “Hey, sorry I’m being such a lousy friend not keeping up with the rhythm of our convo” / “Sorry! I was doing [fill in the blank], hence my late reply” … You get it. The list could go on and on. Why do we do that?

How did they do it back in the days?

I thought about it. Many times. Or, should I say: I think about it. Literally all the time. Why do we keep apologising for that when … messaging apps, texts and smartphones did not exist before the beginning of this century? Were people apologising for not writing a letter back in time? I mean, yeah, okay, I guess they were. But the thing is: as we spend an alarming amount of time on our phones – daily –, we feel like we should apologise for taking this long to answer since we’re supposed and expected to use our phone everyday. We might see a message, be busy or not feel like answering right away, and then when it comes to actually replying, we realise the amount of time that has passed between us seeing the notification and us being about to type a response. Oh my! This is so rude, plain impolite! 

On the importance of acknowledging it

So here it comes: once again, the big entrance of smartphones and apps has changed our approach to relationships and how we talk to one another. We know it, deeply. But it’s with this kind of little detail (that is not so much a little detail, and we’ll see why very soon) that we can realise it, take a step back and ask ourselves: “shit, why am I feeling bad and sorry when people before me did not even have to deal with that?” I talked about the whole topic with one of my flatmates. It should just be as she said it: “If they get mad because you were busy or didn't feel like answering right way, let them be mad. You don’t live through your phone. You can’t spend every minute of your day answering messages because in the end, this is not real life.” Okay, hear me out. You might think that, yeah, duh, it's super cheesy and dumb, we all know it. But sometimes we don’t act upon it. We fake acknowledging it.

Anxiety and late replies

As someone who struggles with a major anxiety disorder, I can assure you we don’t ackownledge it like we should, because it really is these simple trains of thought and putting it seriously into perspective that help realise how insignificant it all is. Anxiety gives me constant stress about answering too late, and when I'm faced with friends who apologise when not even answering “late” at all (what is being late, after all? Okay, that'll be for another time, got it), it makes me feel even more guilty (not that I'm blaming them at all). I go “oh, so that means they were super pissed when I took a whole eleven hours to reply to their message talking about how we can't wait for the holiday to come?” Anxiety makes the whole apologising-for-a-late-reply thing way, way worse. I’ve cried about it. I’ve had small panick attacks about it. Because it sometimes is too much and I'm not used to this constant text-typing activity. So now, this is part of the bad habits I'm trying to get rid of. For some people who also tend to apologise when there's no need to apologise, it’s not as anxiety inducing as it is for me. But it just gets to my head a bit too much, just enough to make me feel that annoying pain in my stomach.

This is not reality

To the ones who apologise for a late answer when obviously there was nothing urgent or serious about our conversation, I tell them: No, you don’t have to apologise for that, there’s no such thing as a late answer. When you obsess about a thing like this just like me, you do put things into perspective in their plain, serious way, as said above. I remember a friend from high school texting me, and I took two days to answer and apologised for it. She said: “No, don’t apologise, it’s a text, you answer whenever you want, it’s the point of a text. We’re not in person.” And oh. did. it. hit. Yes, leaving someone in a silent void on the phone or in person would be completely rude and weird, but it’s. a. written. message. A written text you’ve maybe changed and corrected a few times, a few lines that don’t say much about which tone you would actually use in person to say that. Which basically means, it’s not necessarily spontaneous at all. It’s not real! It’s not real, it’s virtual! Okay, I’m not going to go too far with that argument otherwise I guess Black Mirror producers would be suing me.

The point is, messaging apps and texts have changed so much for us in these few years that it can get complicated for some of us to handle the pressure of replying to everything and everyone – a pressure a lot of others don’t even feel and think exists. Of course, diving into that very precise topic means dealing with the whole “omg technology has changed us humans so much” debate. It can’t avoid the typical, cliché questions of “Have our phones taken over?” and “What are the negative impacts of technology today?” But it can put light on the fact that we definitely should not apologise for not replying instantly to casual texts.