The Mental Load of Being Reachable
When did we normalise permanent availability?
My phone has already buzzed thirty-three times today, and it is not yet noon.
I am not complaining about the volume. I chose this. I run a company, I have a family, I maintain friendships across time zones. The messages are not unwelcome. What I am trying to name is something else: the particular weight of knowing that at any moment, another one could arrive.
This feeling is not new to me. It has been there for years, a low hum running beneath everything else. What changed recently is that I stopped dismissing it as a personal failing, some deficiency of focus or discipline, and started recognising it for what it is: a predictable psychological response to the way our communication tools are designed.
I work in product. I build software. And in product, we like to tell ourselves that we’re building tools as proxies for things people already do. More often than not, we’re not. We’re building entirely new behaviours, and then acting surprised when people adapt to them.
This is especially true for communication. Always-on communication wasn’t inevitable. It was a product decision. And like all product decisions, it came with trade-offs. Some of those trade-offs we measured. Others we exported quietly onto users and never looked at again.
What follows is my attempt to explain why this weight exists, where it came from, and why the usual advice to “just set boundaries” misses the point entirely. This is not a wellness piece. It is not about digital detox or screen time. It is about a structural problem that we have individualised into a personal one, and what it might mean to see it clearly.
“The anxiety isn’t caused by how many messages we receive. It’s caused by knowing that someone can reach us at any time.”
I find myself thinking about MSN Messenger more often than I expect to. Not because I miss the interface, or the sounds, or even the people I spoke to on it, but because of how it felt to communicate then. You could see who was online. If someone wasn’t there, you couldn’t message them. There was no composing into the void, no quiet expectation sitting with them until they returned. Conversations began when both people arrived and ended when one of them left. When it was over, it was over. Nothing lingered.
That constraint sounds trivial now. It wasn’t. It did important psychological work. It meant obligation only existed while presence was shared. Absence wasn’t silent judgement. It was just absence.
The shift happened gradually, then completely.
When communication is presence-based, obligation exists only while both people are present. When communication is persistent, obligation begins the moment a message is delivered, regardless of whether the receiver is available.
That distinction sounds small. It is not.
Modern messaging is defined by persistence. Messages can be sent at any time, to anyone, regardless of availability. The message waits. It sits in a queue that the recipient never asked for, creating an obligation on a timeline they do not control.
The anxiety isn’t caused by how many messages we receive. It’s caused by knowing that someone can reach us at any time.
This is what I call latent obligation: the continuous background awareness that you might owe someone a response, even when no specific message is waiting. Every unread message is a suspended task. Until it’s resolved, it takes up space in your head.
“Every unread message is a suspended task.
Until it’s resolved, it takes up space in your head.”
I notice it most when I sit down to do focused work. No notification has fired. Nothing is urgent. And yet, within minutes, I’ve opened Slack anyway, just to check. Just in case. The channel was quiet. I learned nothing. But I couldn’t not look.
The symptoms are predictable. You check your phone not because you heard a notification but because you feel like you should. You think about a conversation you have not yet had. You remember, hours later, that you forgot to reply, and the forgetting itself becomes a secondary failure requiring its own repair. You feel a faint guilt when you deliberately go offline, even when you have every right to.
These are not personality quirks. They are not signs of poor boundaries or weak character. They are the ordinary psychological responses to a communication architecture that assumes permanent availability as its baseline.
“Silence didn’t used to require explanation.
Now it often does.”
Something else shifted alongside the technology, and it is harder to see because it happened socially rather than structurally.
Responsiveness became moral.
Silence didn’t used to require explanation. Now it often does.
At some point, the speed of your reply became a proxy for how much you care. A delayed response is no longer neutral. It is interpreted. They saw the message and chose not to reply. They are busy, which means I am not a priority. They must be upset with me.
In Slack, the green dot becomes a subtle accusation. You can see that someone is active. You can see that they have read channels but not replied to yours. In Teams, presence indicators carry the same weight. “Last seen 3 minutes ago” is not a neutral timestamp. It is social information, available to anyone who chooses to read it.
We do this to others, and we do it to ourselves. We’ve quietly moralised responsiveness. Being late isn’t just inconvenient anymore. It’s interpreted as thoughtless, unreliable, or uncaring.
Last week, I noticed myself feeling a flicker of irritation when a colleague didn’t reply to a message for several hours. It was not urgent. There was no deadline. And yet I caught myself thinking: they’ve been online, I can see it, why haven’t they responded? I was doing exactly what I am critiquing. The tools had trained me without my noticing.
This is new. A missed phone call, before voicemail became ubiquitous, carried no such weight. The person was not home. You would try again later. There was no observable gap between message sent and message read, no timestamp marking exactly when the other person became aware and chose not to respond.
Now there is. And that visibility has quietly rewritten the social contract around communication.
From a product perspective, this outcome is predictable. That is precisely what makes it uncomfortable.
When building communication tools, teams optimise for reach, speed, engagement, and convenience. These are measurable. They show up in dashboards. They correlate with growth. A product that delivers messages instantly, to anyone, regardless of availability, will outcompete one that requires both parties to be present. The efficiency gains are obvious.
What does not show up in dashboards is psychological cost.
No product roadmap ever includes a line item for “creates low-grade, persistent guilt.” But that doesn’t mean the cost doesn’t exist. It just means it’s carried privately. The anxiety of being interruptible at any moment is diffuse and normalised. It does not feel like a bug. It feels like life.
This is the structure of an externality. The system captures the efficiency gains. Users carry the costs in private. And because those costs are distributed across millions of individuals, each experiencing them in isolation, they never aggregate into a problem that demands a solution. They are just the way things are.
I want to be direct about something, because I think clarity here matters.
Product teams are incentivised to increase usage. We optimise obsessively for monthly active users, daily engagement, stickiness, reduced churn. We run experiments designed to change behaviour: increase frequency, reduce friction, pull users back more often. This is not unusual. It is the ordinary practice of building products that succeed.
Whether we admit it or not, a lot of product work involves shaping user psychology so that people choose us more often than something else.
I am not saying this is sinister. I am saying it is real, and that it creates questions we do not always stop to ask.
I’ll go further. I use email open tracking in my own outbound campaigns. I know exactly when someone opens a message. I know if they opened it three times. I know if they forwarded it. This information is useful to me. It helps me time follow-ups, gauge interest, prioritise effort. And I am also aware that every time I send a tracked email, I am creating for someone else the exact pressure I have spent this essay describing. They do not know I can see them. But I can. And that visibility is not neutral.
I do not have a clean resolution to this. I use the tools. I also know what they cost.
What is the psychological cost of designing for maximum reachability? What happens when increasing engagement quietly increases obligation? Are we blind to the long-term effects because they do not show up in metrics? Is this simply the cost of progress, or is that framing an excuse we use to avoid looking?
We’re very good at measuring the upside of engagement. We’re much worse at noticing the long-term psychological costs, because they don’t aggregate cleanly.
Always-on reachability was not a law of nature. Infinite persistence was not technically mandatory. We chose convenience and growth, often without fully pricing the consequences. It is not that we intended these outcomes. It is that our tools for measuring success do not incentivise us to see them.
I do not think this makes product leaders villains. But I do think it means we cannot pretend ignorance indefinitely. If we build tools that compete for attention by extending psychological reach, then we cannot pretend surprise when that reach becomes a burden.
“We’re very good at measuring the upside of engagement.
We’re much worse at noticing the long-term psychological costs.”
The instinct, at this point, is to reach for individual solutions. Mute notifications. Schedule focus time. Be more intentional.
I have tried this. I have turned off badges, scheduled Do Not Disturb windows, built systems to batch my communications into discrete blocks. It works, in the sense that I am interrupted less often. It does not work in the sense that matters: the background hum remains. The awareness that messages are accumulating, that someone might be waiting, that silence is being observed and interpreted. The tools are quieter. The weight is the same.
These strategies are not wrong, exactly. They are just incomplete.
When millions of people independently experience the same pattern of low-grade anxiety, the cause is not a million individual failures of discipline. It is architectural. The tools are built to assume you are always available. The social norms that grew up around those tools encode the same assumption. The psychological cost is the predictable output of that design, distributed across a population that never asked for it and has no collective means to refuse it.
Personal strategies can help at the margins. But they cannot change the underlying structure. They are accommodations to a system, not alternatives to it.
This pattern is not unique to messaging.
The same dynamic appears wherever friction is removed without replacement. Friction, it turns out, often serves a purpose. It creates separation. It marks transitions. It signals that one mode of interaction has ended and another has not yet begun.
When communication required presence, presence was the friction. You had to be there, and so did the other person, and that mutual requirement created natural boundaries. When that friction disappeared, nothing replaced it. The boundary simply collapsed. And the cognitive work that the boundary used to perform migrated somewhere else.
It migrated into the mind.
I am not arguing that we should return to an earlier model. The convenience of asynchronous communication is real, and for many purposes, essential. The ability to send a message whenever it occurs to you, knowing it will be there when the other person is ready, is genuinely useful.
But convenience has costs that do not appear on the balance sheet. The question is not whether asynchronous messaging is good or bad. It is whether we have accurately accounted for what it asks of us, and whether we have been honest about who bears that cost.
The tools we build are not neutral. Every default teaches users how to behave. Every architectural decision encodes an assumption about what is normal, what is expected, what silence means. When we built tools that assume permanent availability, we also built the expectation that permanent availability is reasonable. That expectation now feels like common sense. It is not. It is a design choice that became a social norm.
If the tools we build normalise permanent availability, then the anxiety required to sustain that availability is also something we’ve designed. The one follows from the other, whether or not anyone meant it to.
Communication tools made this visible because the effects are immediate and ubiquitous. Most of us feel them daily. But the underlying pattern is not limited to messaging.
It appears wherever friction is removed without asking what that friction was protecting. Wherever engagement is optimised without measuring what engagement costs. Wherever behaviour is nudged, defaults are set, and users adapt to systems that were never designed with their long-term psychology in mind.
Feeds that reward compulsive checking. Workflows that blur the boundary between available and unavailable. Recommendation systems that learn what captures attention without asking whether attention was freely given. The mechanisms differ. The structure is the same: optimise for one metric, export the psychological cost elsewhere, and never revisit the trade-off once the numbers look good.
I do not think most product leaders set out to create anxiety. I do think we have developed a remarkable capacity for not seeing it. Our tools for measuring success are precise. Our tools for measuring cost are almost nonexistent. And so we optimise toward what we can see, and assume that what we cannot see is not our problem.
Communication is just one place where the cost finally became legible. It will not be the last.
Is permanent availability inevitable, or just profitable? And what else are we shaping without noticing?
What we choose not to measure still shapes people. That, in itself, is a design decision.