Someone sends a meme. Three people react with a laughing emoji. Someone says “lmao” and then nothing for four days. This is not a conversation. It is a proof of life — a small periodic signal that says we still exist to each other, that the connection is technically active, that the friendship is alive in the same way a plant you haven’t watered in two weeks is alive. Technically. For now.
The group chat replaced a version of friendship that required more. Showing up somewhere. Making plans and keeping them. Sitting across from someone long enough that the conversation ran out of surface and had to go somewhere real. The group chat can run indefinitely on almost no fuel — a link here, a screenshot there, a “this is so us” that everyone reacts to and nobody responds to. It stays warm without anyone having to actually tend it.
The strange thing is how much the chat can diverge from the actual state of the friendships. A group chat can be very active — genuinely funny, genuinely warm, regular enough to feel like something — while the people in it haven’t been in the same room in two years. The chat is flourishing. The friendship is coasting. Both things are true and everyone in the chat knows it and nobody says it because the chat is the thing that’s keeping the illusion comfortable.
There’s also the group chat that went quiet. You scroll up and the last message was seven months ago, something unanswered, the conversation just tapering off without a conclusion. Nobody officially ended it. Nobody left. It just stopped, the way certain things stop — not with a decision but with an accumulation of not-decisions until the silence became the default. The chat is still there. Everyone is still in it. It’s just a room nobody goes to anymore.
I have a group chat with people I genuinely love that has been running for six years. We have been planning a trip in it since 2022. There are forty-seven messages about the trip. We have not taken the trip. I think the planning might be the trip. I think we might be the kind of friends who are better in the chat than in a shared rental in Portugal and maybe that’s fine. Maybe that’s just what we are now. The chat is real even if the trip isn’t. The laughing emojis are real. I’ll take it.