Scrap the WhatsApp
The WhatsApp groups are becoming yet another layer of personal admin to manage, and Sophie White wants out — but she wishes the exit wasn’t so harsh
The WhatsApp groups are torturing me. I’ve been away from the phone for 15 minutes and there are 156 WhatsApp notifications. And this is not some ‘humble-braggy, woe is me, I am too popular’ moan; I’m pretty sure feeling drained by various endlessly pinging notifications has become the norm for us all.
We’re a generation stalked by our various modes of communication, haunted by blue ticks and hunted by ‘last seen’ updates. Hating life as a WhatsApp-group member seems to be pretty standard. Everyone has the group they hate, be it the school parents’ group, or the obligatory family WhatsApp. I was pretty lucky on this front, in that my family were late adopters of WhatsApp, and the family group has, thus far, proved something of a flop.
None of the relatives are very savvy in matters of the internet, so they keep spamming the group with obvious scams and then mocking whoever falls for them.
The WhatsApp group currently giving me the biggest face ache was started by Himself, and contains not only all his male friends, but all the wives and girlfriends too. It is a 19-person-strong meme factory of unending slagging and videos of drunken singing. I’m not a no-fun bastard; I liked it at the beginning, for sure. But somewhere around the time the game ‘is it a penis or is it a finger?’ took hold, I started to withdraw.
“There is no soft exit. All members see the rather damning and stark ‘Sophie has left the group’”
The main problem is that in order to keep up with all the references and in-jokes, you’d have to be glued to the group. If you miss more than 10 updates, it’s impossible to get back on top of things and then, before you know it, you’re thinking of your friends as pesky admin. The issue is that leaving a group is tricky — everyone in the group knows you’ve opted out. One friend left their family group and it caused controversy.
There’s no soft exit for a group: all members see the damning and rather stark ‘Sophie has left the group’. Something milder and less like ‘we are storming out’ would be far better. ‘Sophie is ambling away for a bit of quiet time because 82 WhatsApp notifications is just too intense,’ would work.
Last week, optics be damned, I’d finally resolved to leave. ‘Exit group,’ I selected, only for the app itself to intervene. ‘Mute instead?’ popped up, presumably trying to save me from a grave social blunder. Fine, I huffed. I stewed over the decision while making this stew, and eventually opted to mute until autumn 2018.