“Yes, but when do you become old?” My friend said this as soon as I uttered my headline above. Usually he just rolls his eyes at my proclamations. 

But here me out: I’ve told my kids there will come a day in the hopefully distant future when they will need to sit me down and say, “Dad, it’s really dangerous out there, and it’s time that we took some of your privileges away. This is for your own good and the well-being of perfect strangers.” Of course I am talking about my car keys. This prophylactic move is itself an outdated gesture, since everyone driving now has half an eye on the road and the rest of their eyes on their devices, so that even a legally blind but fully committed driver is probably safer, actuarially speaking. But now I might have to have the same conversation with them about my phone, specifically its ability to receive and send texts to large groups of people. 

Basically, it’s too fast. There is not enough friction, physical or monetary. It’s too easy to send out decontextualized language to your friends and family and internet friends and probable strangers. I’m not really talking about the unconsciously racist uncle post, though sure, that too. The whole problem with frictionless near-instant global communication is that people have terrible thoughts, expressed terribly, encountered at the worst possible time. It’s the future! 

What I mean is simpler: at some point, texting should be disabled on old people’s phones. For the sake of this idea, old people are defined as people much older than me. You know ’em when you see ’em. The technology is too powerful, like using a light saber to floss your teeth. It’s barely wielded safely by the youths out there. It’s no wonder those of us post-30 are endangered by these devices. 

This is most easily witnessed in the group chat, the noise rock of modern networked communication. The first problem with the group chat is that it’s bad qua communication. I don’t need seventeen thumbs-up emojis to clock everyone’s agreement. Text is faster than a phone call, but then it leaves all this shrapnel in its wake. And then someone wakes up and responds as if the chat is a one-to-one communication and the jokes go sideways fast. Or worst offense: the responder starts riffing unknowingly on another person in the chat. A group chat can be a wonderful thing. But negotiating the rhetorical demands of the chat can be like trying to pull an eyelash out of a drawer full of knives. When I am compelled to respond to large group chats, my answers are fully denuded of flair, a single Y or N to questions, as if I had actually fulfilled that promise to myself and gone back to flip phone land. It’s like throwing a party; if you didn’t write up the guest list, you don’t really know who’s there. Proceed accordingly.

A young person’s response to an older person sounding off unawares in the group chat tends to take two silent directions. First, there is the Michael Jackson-eating-popcorn-gif response. I wish I were this mature and/or callous. The second response, my response, is to emotionally absorb and project all the potential social ramifications of this faux pas, which when given the number of group chats that I am in — even as a non-popular person who is not young — generates a lot of psychic stress. Call it something catchy like “emotional labor.”

And honestly, maybe that’s the real problem. Maybe the old person who needs to have his texting taken away is me. I am mostly okay with the sending of the texts. But receiving them wears me out. It’s just so much language. And there is no hierarchy to it. Reminders from my dentist come at the same emotional volume as kid school notifications or cries for help from family members. There’s a riot in my pocket, and I’m terrible at prioritizing. 

Have you thought about turning off your notifications? Yes, thank you, I have. The only notifications I receive are calls or texts. The people who allow notifications from anything else strike me as bent, or just much stronger than I will ever be. I’ve even silenced my phone completely, so that texts only vibrate, which has lead to missing actually important communication, thus strengthening my already substantial paranoia about giving and receiving and missing all types of messages. All networked communication has the seasick whir of the slot machine: the next one could always be big money.  

Perhaps the problem is similar to my email problem: I can’t stand to see any number of unread messages. I have to clear them out. I remember in the third grade when we got mailboxes at school and the utter thrill of discovering I had notes to read. It’s the same feeling, now split across actual physical mail (always junk), personal email (almost always junk), work email (90% junk, 5% need-to-know, and 5% act-on-immediately), and texts (5% junk, 30% unnecessary responses, 54% memes, 10% logistical negotiations, and 1% emergencies). Phone calls are now almost exclusively the arena of situations that need immediate attention. My family has been conditioned by my personality, so that when they call me their first words are “Don’t panic. I’m alright.” They don’t even say hello. In their defense, neither do I. My first words are “What’s wrong?” 

There are doldrums during the week when I don’t get texts, and then I find myself lonely and bored, and I start texting people, just to gin up some conversation. Perhaps the problem is that I don’t get quite enough texts. If I got a little bit more, there would be too many for me to deal with, and my need to liquify that little red bubble would wear down out of exhaustion. I often have the same idea regarding travel. I travel just enough to see how terrible I am at travel. But if I travelled more, then I would streamline. Or I should stop travelling altogether and go in peace. 

Which is what I think of texting. Perhaps I am the old person. Perhaps I am on the cusp of talking trash about someone on a group chat accidentally and hurting people’s feelings. Perhaps my kids should knock my phone out of my hand. I know that I don’t need all this communication to function in the world, but once it’s available, once it becomes a habit of communication, it’s difficult to imagine life without it. It feels like missing out, because it is missing out. The constant parsing of overwhelming noise is the bounty of a full and active life. If it’s too loud, you’re too old.