i think we’re all just trying to pace our human heartbeats to a world set to push-notification bpm. the slow, irregular pulse of being human is getting synced to the artificial cadence of alerts, dings, and notifications. almost like we’re forced to breathe in push-notification tempo instead of our own.
i am walking home with my phone in my pocket and it vibrates twice—two small, impatient ticks—and the world contracts for a second into the size of that rectangle. i stand on the curb and watch a couple argue softly across the street, their mouths moving like marionettes, and i think about how once we measured each other by presence: by who offered their coat when winter climbed your bones, by who noticed the way your laugh disappeared when your old friend called. now we measure by timestamps, by the rhythm of blue bubbles, by whether a reply arrives in the jaunt between life’s needed moments. there is a grief to that measuring, a tiny funeral held every time someone does not answer. i miss the rituals i never knew i valued until they were gone. the kind of rituals that could not be reduced to a push notification or an emoji.
when i was younger, waiting was a practice. messages would lie historic on the answering machine, letters unstamped on kitchen tables… and when you finally listened to or read them, days later, they tasted richer for the delay; longing had time to curdle. magically ripened by absence. there was mystery and patience. the absence was an ingredient to a full life, rather than an accusation. now absence arrives with a read receipt and an app that tells us when someone was last seen. the tools that promise to bring us together have trained us to expect each other like service—on demand, immediate, standardized. we have outsourced a portion of trust to indicators and icons. no wonder we’re loving less and clocking inventory more… how many pings did they send today, how many likes did their photo gather, what kind of visibility did i have into their day? attention has become currency; scarcity inflates its price. the more scarce the reply, the higher our panic bids... gahhhh!
some nights, which i’m finding more rare these days, i am the anxious one. i am small in the face of silence under my blank ceiling, and i stitch self reassurance together from thin things: a clip of a song that makes my blood warm, a re-read of some of my favorite lines, a “you awake?” at 2 a.m. to my husband asleep beside me… i know those impulses intimately; they have pulsed through my body when my hands felt cold with worry. i have loved and soothed myself with quick check-ins to fill space, tiny anchors that remind me, in their smallness, you are not alone. but i have also been the other kind of person: the one who finds constant messaging suffocating, who loves fiercely but loves better when given space to work and to sleep and to forget about my phone for an hour or a day. being tethered minute-to-minute feels like being asked to perform affection on cue. it’s exhausting to be charming all day for the sake of proving you exist to someone else.
somewhere between these two versions of me, between the person who needs signals and the person who needs silence, is the place most of us fail to name. somewhere in that place we forget to ask the simple question to each other “what do you need to feel safe, to just be?” yet we expect each other to live at the same tempo. we assume our default is universally applied: that anyone who loves us should want the same amount of contact, the same cadence of self-reassurance. when that assumption fails, we accuse instead of inquire. we call it “needy” or on the other end of the spectrum.. “cold.”
i don’t believe technology created this hunger; it has only amplified an old one. attachment has always existed—children learn it from parents who held them or didn’t, lovers learn it from calls that were answered or left to ring. what technology has done is telescope the experience, turning small anxieties into constant static. our brains are skilled at manufacturing meaning but terrible at tolerating ambiguity, so when we see someone online and they do not reach out, the nervous system reads it as threat. we reach instead for scripts we trust: the quick “busy,” the two-word code that signals absence with intention. these scripts are not cheap. they are acts of care in themselves, small contracts that say i see your hand, give me a moment to show you mine.
there is a peculiar poetry in setting those little agreements; they are modern rituals, humble and practical. “i will text you when i think of you,” someone told me once, and i loved the simplicity of it. the permission to be spontaneous, the refusal to make constant attention mandatory. another time i learned to send that single breadcrumb, a tiny “thinking of you” during a long workday, and watched how my friend’s shoulders unknotted. i’ve adopted this choreography and for the most part it frees me from the constant ask to be online. i am a present mom because of it. my health thanks me because of it. my business is successful because of it. my marriage is whole because of it.
yet there are moments when that choreography is not enough between two players. if your nervous systems are mismatched—if one of you is calmed by constant contact and the other is drained by it—no amount of elegant protocol will convert hunger into contentment. that is the cruel truth: love does not always equal fit. we can adore someone and still discover that the mechanics of our attachment are incompatible. departures between friends (i say that with grace) happen with tenderness sometimes and with terrible ruptures at others (these ones puncture deep). some people say, angrily, that wanting consistent texts/calls is proof of immaturity. others feel that craving space from “online” is a form of emotional unavailability. both condemnations are lazy. the courageous thing is to sit in the discomfort, ask what the real needs are, to be brave enough to negotiate—and, if negotiation cannot bridge the gulf, to accept that parting with care is sometimes the most loving choice between two people.
i am curious about what it would feel like to return to a culture that valued absence as much as presence. could yearning become a good thing again, not a sign of insecurity but a garden for desire? could we allow our emotional lives to have seasons: the busy work months, the abundant weekends, the slow winters where conversation happens over longer stretches? i imagine a world where a quick “busy, later” is met with trust rather than suspicion; where a voice note—ten imperfect seconds of breath and tone—means more than a hundred polished messages. or a call for that matter! (personally love this. efficient. feels great. and leaves no leftover fomo or longing.) i wonder, too, if we might learn to slow our reflex for immediate validation, to seek other reservoirs of community so that our partners do not have to be the whole village, or our home as our “all eggs in one basket” type of everything.
oh, how easily the tools we love can become the prisons we hate. the same phones that connect us can become instruments of measurement, ways to tally affection and to punish by absence. the antidote, i think, is not a moral crusade to text less or more; it is an everyday practice of naming, of agreeing lightly and compassionately, of learning each other’s languages without trying to rewrite them. we need fluency in both silence and signal. and most importantly, we need to resist such quickness to judge. to stop pinning ourselves inside dramas that don’t even exist, simply because a reply is delayed or a season of life finds us on different pages.
so tonight i will put my phone face down in the other room, sooner. not out of habit but as an experiment. i will let a few hours pass unaccounted for and watch whether anxiety hollows out or patience blooms instead. i will be both reachable and unreachable, present and away. and if my phone vibrates, i will let my own pulse set the tempo. in human bpm, the absence of a ping is not betrayal; it is the space where longing does what it has always done: it teaches us how to wait.
x
cibelle
from the stillroom, where quiet turns into remedy and presence is always brewing.
love this