The WhatsApp Obligation

The virus of FOMO has come home to roost, and nowhere has it made its presence more insidious than in the WhatsApp groups that have multiplied and metastasized across the globe. I would wager confidently that 95% of subscribers to these alleged Special Interest Groups have simply allowed themselves to be programmed: conditioned, like Pavlov's volunteers, to respond to any stimulus with a mandatory emoji or a hollow two-bit message. Festival or funeral, it matters not. The reflex fires. The thumb moves. The conscience is clear.

Over the years, these groups have multiplied with the vigor of unchecked organisms each sprouting sub-groups, each sub-group spawning sub-sub-groups until the original purpose, if there ever was one, is buried beneath an avalanche of forwarded memes, good-morning GIFs, and performative and perfunctory condolences.

What drives this behavior? Beneath the surface lies a quiet terror: the fear of popularity erosion. The anxiety of invisibility. Never mind whether one actually knows the audience or has anything meaningful to contribute. Silence, in this culture, is misread as indifference. And so relevance is quietly retired, shelved for posterity perhaps, while reflex ascends to become the new religion.

I have, over the years, tried to be deliberate subscribing only to a selective handful of groups where genuine interests are discussed, where I still hope my faculties might soak in some hard-to-find nourishment for my grey cells. But even these have proven fallible. They too attract the overzealous: the compulsive signatories who must make their presence felt on every thread, relevant or otherwise, as though existence itself requires constant witness.

The toll of deleting this daily deluge has visited upon me an unexpected adversary: carpal tunnel syndrome a painful condition born of repetitive strain, and a cruel irony for someone who joined these groups in pursuit of intellectual sustenance.

And so I am left with a Hobson's choice: endure the discomfort and preserve access to the rare, genuinely enriching exchange or exit entirely and surrender even that. For now, I have chosen the former. I limp along, thumb bandaged, scrolling with the weary patience of a man waiting for the trade-off to tilt, finally, in his favor.✍🏽