Remember when you called someone’s landline and if they weren’t available, it meant you couldn’t reach them? You may have asked a relative to pass on a message, but a call back wasn’t necessarily a certainty, or even mandatory. And that was okay — we all had the same expectations of each other. Today, not responding to a call or text is almost disrespectful and can often put our relationships and jobs at stake, which can lead to continuous pressure to answer and take action — regardless of what one is doing in real time.

Is the way we’re being asked to live right now objectively unnatural? Up until two decades ago (and throughout the entire history of humanity), no one has ever had to be accessible 24 hours a day. The constant bombardment of calls and messages and the expectation that we should respond immediately means that it’s easy to find yourself too overwhelmed to engage with people around you — your social battery drained, even with no one around.

Nothing in our brains or in our culture has evolved to adequately maintain this level of contact. Before the cell phone, leaving the house meant that you were unreachable. It was understood that the only people who were obligated to be on call 24/7 through pagers or early cell phones were professionals with extreme high-pressure jobs. Being expected to respond instantly, no matter where you were or what you were doing, was portrayed as an objectively stressful way to live. But that did not stop the rapid spread of technology and its ability to make everyone available, all the time. It has affected the way we communicate faster than we’ve been able to adapt to it, taking a toll on our social skills.

Too much of a good thing: Online communication can provide a sense of community and social support for people who may not have access to them otherwise. For example, it was an important resource during the pandemic. But balancing the positive aspects of connection and the debilitating pressure of instantaneous responses hasn’t been mastered on a large scale, making many of us feel overwhelmed and burned out.

Being overwhelmed by the pressure to respond to messages may seem dramatic at face value, but how many of us have turned the visibility of our online status or read receipts off to avoid responding instantaneously? It’s all done to give ourselves plausible deniability if we take our time to message back or avoid interactions entirely.

The problem with constant access to communication tools boils down to the fact that we’re all talking to each other, all the time. As of this year, the average person spends 143 minutes per day browsing social media. Even if you view just one post per minute — which isn’t the case — you would have seen 143 posts from 143 people in just under 2.5 hours. The accepted biological threshold for your social life? 150 people.

150 is the number of people who you can have meaningful relationships with… throughout your whole life. This theory, which calculates the limit of people with whom you can have an actual long-lasting connection with, was proposed by British psychologist Robert Dunbar and has been widely accepted (though not without criticism). While you can develop up to 150 significant bonds, only 15 of those are intimate relationships or close friendships. A larger social network, says Dunbar, would compromise the quality of all your relationships.

It’s also compromising your cognitive ability… Experts have found evidence that the steady stream of notifications reduces our ability to focus and think critically. Those aren’t unfortunate side-effects — they’re expected and entirely natural consequences of constant connectivity. You can’t check your phone without checking out of what’s going on around you. In fact, there’s solid evidence that just the presence of your phone, even on silent, is enough to impact your attention span.

…and your emotional regulation. There is plenty of evidence that receiving (or not receiving) a message affects us on an emotional level. The effect of online availability and the social expectations that come with it, can trigger an emotional rollercoaster that includes anxiety, concern, and fear of rejection. Those may also be accompanied by annoyance or even anger. Most will fail to consider objective reasons behind not receiving a reply, projecting their own anxieties, and taking it as a personal slight (we are looking at you).

This also takes a toll on society. Social media is widening the divide between people with different opinions. Christopher Bail, director of the Polarization Lab, studied how technology amplifies ideological divisions alongside a team of social scientists, computer scientists, and statisticians. In 2021, they recruited 1.2k American Twitter users who identified themselves as Democrats or Republicans and paid each of them to follow a specific Twitter account. The Democrats were assigned Republican bots, and vice versa.

Bail wanted to see if exposure to a different ideology would make either group more moderate…it had the opposite effect. Bail reported that both sides had become even more entrenched in their ideologies, saying that “Republicans in particular became much more conservative when they followed the Democratic bot, and Democrats became a little bit more liberal.”

We should all know less about each other. In a 2017 study, Deb Roy, director of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication found that people had cut relations with family members, friends, and neighbors after seeing them express their opinions online. It turns out that the path to a functioning and less antagonistic society is psychic distance within our communities. So while constant connectivity as a concept was thought to make people more open-minded and empathetic, in execution, it was found to corrode our desire (and ability) to socialize.

There may not be a sustainable solution to our need (both socially and compulsively) for connectivity, but check out our guide on how to use technology mindfully and foster a healthy relationship with our devices.

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