Maniacal Rage

Back in December I mentioned on Twitter I was toying with enabling the iMessage “send read receipts” option. I’ve had it enabled for more than a month now, and I hate it.

Why did I enable it begin with? I’ve complained in the past on numerous occasions that I’d really like my wife to know when I’ve read a message. It’s annoying to be at the grocery store and receive a “don’t forget eggs!” message only to receive a followup “please let me know you saw this” message a few minutes later. I always want my wife to know when I read her messages—they’re generally action items or requests and she wants confirmation (this same requirement goes the other way, obviously). Ideally, iMessage would allow for per-contact or per-group settings for sending read receipts, but it doesn’t. It should! But it doesn’t. So if I want Stacey to know when I’ve read her messages, I have to let everyone know. Boy oh boy does that complicate things.

We’re dealing with my personal anxieties here, but when someone knows I’ve read their message, a clock starts ticking in my head. They know I read this, I either need to respond soon or ignore it completely. But ignoring a message when the sender knows you read it feels awful. Imagine if email had a read-receipt feature… I’d uninstall all of my email clients and never send another email in my life. This time pressure makes normal, non-important messages suddenly feel more weighty. Hey, what are you up to this weekend? Instead of having time to mull over hanging out or just sitting on the couch all weekend, you suddenly feel pressured to either answer immediately or wait three days and pretend you never saw the message at all. Which leads to the second issue: trying to avoid sending receipts entirely.

Now the game is to decide, based on a person’s name, if I need to avoid sending a read receipt until I’m ready for them to know I’ve read the message. This is not as simple as it sounds. If the message comes in while the phone is locked, I have to make sure not to swipe on it or to kill it because those both send a read receipt. If I’m in the middle of using my phone and the alert banner drops from the top of the screen, I can’t pull it down to read more—that sends a receipt. And if I’ve already opened a message thread with this person in Messages.app and want to read new messages from other people, I’m screwed—even killing Messages.app will frequently relaunch it into the previous thread, thus sending a receipt. This game is bullshit and stressful and not fun at all.

Sending read receipts completely removes the feeling of being offline. When you don’t send receipts, people can send you as many messages as they’d like but until (if ever) you respond they have no idea if you received the message at all and they can make the safe assumption you might be unavailable at the moment. I like this. I miss this. With read receipts enabled, you’re always online. People know the minute you glance at their message. Sometimes I’m in the middle of feeding my kids but I glance at the phone. Now for the next hour this person knows I’ve read but haven’t responded. Why do I need this stress?

I know, I know. You’re thinking, why not just ignore this and be okay with people knowing you’ve read a message even if you haven’t responded? And I’m trying over here, I really am. But it’s not easy. You should see how many emails I’ve received in the past year currently snoozed in Mailbox to “someday”… I just can’t admit to myself that I don’t have time to respond to everyone and it bothers me to no end.

As much as I hate how they make me feel, I’ve decided sending read receipts to my wife outweighs the negatives of having the rest of the world constantly judging me and thinking I’m judging them. So I’m keeping them enabled. Hopefully one day Apple will improve this feature and allow us to set it per-person and free me from this nightmare.