“We are not lacking in moments of connection. We are lacking in moments of depth.”
– Sherry Turkle
HERE we are: The notification chimes. Your phone lights up. Family group chat – 47 unread messages. You scroll. Birthday wishes. A forwarded video you’ve seen three times. Someone asking, “Anyone free for dinner?” at 2.00 pm. A political article. Someone’s child winning an award. Heart emojis. Thumbs up. More forwards.
You close the app.
Later, someone messages privately: “Why didn’t you reply in the group?”
And you think: Because I have nothing to say to 47 messages that said nothing at all.
This is the paradox. We are more connected than any generation in history. 97.7% of Malaysians use WhatsApp.
The average group chat has 27 members. We send billions of messages daily. We’re always available, always reachable, always just a ping away. And we’ve never been more lonely.
When Presence Became Performance
Let me take you back to 1990s Kuching. You wanted to see your friend? You walked to their house and knocked. If they weren’t home, you came back later. Or you didn’t. Life continued.
When you finally saw them – maybe a week later, maybe a month – you had things to talk about. You’d missed them. Genuinely missed them. And in that space between meetings, something happened: the friendship breathed. It rested. It accumulated stories worth sharing.
Today? Your best friend is three chat groups away. You see their life in real-time. Their breakfast. Their complaints. Their memes. Everything. All the time.
And somewhere in that constant stream, the friendship stopped growing. Because growth requires space. And we’ve eliminated all the space.
I watched my uncle’s funeral arrangements happen in a WhatsApp group last year. Seventy-three messages coordinating flowers, food, parking, seating. Efficiency incarnate. Not one person called to ask how the family was actually coping. Not one.
That’s when I understood: we’ve replaced presence with logistics. Connection with coordination. Friendship with task management.
The Death of Missing Someone
Here’s what we’ve lost: the ache of absence.
Your grandmother knew this feeling. The longing to see someone you loved. The anticipation of reunion. The joy of catching up after time apart. These weren’t bugs in the system of friendship – they were features. They created value. They made moments matter.
Now? We don’t miss people anymore. We monitor them.
We know what they ate for lunch. Where they went last weekend. How they feel about politics. We see their children grow up in photographs. We witness their victories and failures in status updates. We’re present for everything – and present for nothing.
The Dao teaches that emptiness is what makes a cup useful. The space between visits made friendship useful. Made it precious. But we’ve filled every space with notifications, and now the cup holds nothing.
The Performance Trap
Here’s the lie we’ve been sold: more communication equals better connection.
Malaysian mothers in WhatsApp groups know better. Group chats spiral into silent pressure and comparison, where parenting becomes performative. One mum posts her toddler’s reading progress. Another shares a homemade learning corner. Before long, the group feels like a scoreboard where aesthetic posts earn floods of heart emojis whilst a vulnerable text from a struggling mum gets radio silence.
Because some things are too hard to say in a group chat – a redundancy, a break-up, a bereavement, depression, failing marriage, financial collapse. The moments that actually matter can’t be dropped casually between forwarded videos and restaurant recommendations.
So what happens? We save those moments for private chats. Or we don’t share them at all. And the group chat becomes theatre – a performance space where we present curated versions of our lives whilst the real struggles remain unspoken.
This isn’t connection. This is performance anxiety disguised as community.
The 24/7 Availability Trap
Marcus Aurelius taught: “You have power over your mind – not outside events.”
But do we?
The group chat demands presence. Not occasional. Constant. If you don’t respond within hours, you’re neglectful. If you leave messages unread, you’re rude. If you exit the group, you’re making a statement.
We’ve created a system where availability equals care. And unavailability equals abandonment.
Your grandfather never had this problem. When he visited his friend at the kedai kopi, they talked. When he went home, the conversation ended. It resumed next time. Nobody expected him to be emotionally available 24 hours a day.
Now we do. And it’s killing us.
Research shows that constant connectivity creates stress, not closeness. We’re perpetually half-present – checking messages whilst working, responding whilst parenting, scrolling whilst supposedly relaxing. We’re everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.
The Buddhist principle of samma vayama (right effort) teaches balance. But there’s nothing balanced about being perpetually on call for 12 different group chats, each demanding different versions of yourself.
What Friendship Actually Requires
The ease of friendship – that unthinking, ambient closeness you only get when you’re young and within walking distance – dilutes as you grow up. Any get-together must be booked weeks or months in advance. “How’s your 2026 looking?”
And somewhere in that logistical nightmare, we convinced ourselves that the group chat was the solution. That constant digital proximity could replace actual presence.
It can’t.
Because friendship isn’t information exchange. It’s not status updates or memes or heart reactions. Friendship is vulnerability. Presence. Attention. Time.
And those things can’t be scaled across 47 people where conversation moves too fast to connect and too shallow to matter.
Here’s what nobody’s asking: Why did we accept that friendship should require this much work?
Your grandmother maintained deep friendships with less communication in a year than you have in a week. She wasn’t more skilled at relationships. She had better infrastructure for them. Physical proximity. Shared spaces. Regular, unhurried face-to-face time.
We’ve traded all of that for convenience. And now we’re working three times harder to feel half as connected.
The Way Forward
So what do we do?
We recalibrate. Not by abandoning group chats – they coordinate logistics, share information, celebrate milestones. But by remembering what they cannot do: replace the depth of one-to-one connection.
Here’s the practice: Just once this week, instead of replying in the group chat, call someone.
Not text. Call. Let them hear your voice. Ask how they’re actually doing – not the curated version, the real version. Listen without checking other notifications. Give them your full presence, not your divided attention.
Or better: meet them. Actual, physical presence. Coffee. A walk. Sitting at a street burger stall. No phones on the table. Just conversation that doesn’t have an audience, doesn’t get screenshotted, doesn’t need to perform.
Because true friendship asks us to be there for each other in ways that aren’t always convenient, to say things that don’t come with a reaction button, to risk showing up even when we feel out of sync.
The group chat offers none of that. It offers convenience. Efficiency. The appearance of connection.
But friendship – real friendship – has never been convenient or efficient. It’s messy. Requires effort. Demands presence. Takes time.
And that’s exactly what makes it worth keeping.
So let the notifications pile up. Let the group chat continue without you for a while.
Call your friend instead. The one you haven’t actually talked to in months, despite seeing their messages daily.
Call them. Ask how they’re really doing. Listen. Show up.
That’s where friendship lives. Not in the group chat. In the space we create when we choose depth over distance, quality over quantity, connection over performance.
Let it begin with one call. One conversation. One moment of actual presence.
The rest is just noise.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune. The writer can be reached at sufiansarawak@gmail.com.
