Privacy and Socializing
Social acceptance that makes the personality also needs privacy. They are two sides of the same coin. Both are united at the back but never see eye to eye. The result is an orchestra of complementary talks, lies, deceitful behavior, broken promises and repeated disappointments with economic opportunities thrown in between.
Social Media
Social media affects us mainly by increasing distraction and fragmenting attention. Heavy or frequent use of short-form platforms like Reels or forwarded videos of memes makes focus difficult. This is a new challenge to Lifestyle and Personality discussed in Chapter 8. Worse is the disastrous effect it has on our otherwise precarious state of Speech and Communication discussed in [Chapter 10.](https://sandeepbhalla.in/speech-what-is-life-chapter-10/
Communication with the generation born in the last three decades gives only one choice. Say it in one word. Yes. Like a title of a meme. A sentence is too long to focus. This generation, like previous ones is engaged all day long in their regular work but when it comes to communication they can process only one word. Choose it carefully. If this sounds incredible, please revisit Chapter 10 and read again. This is a travesty of human communication. They improve and innovate to make human life better. They create better communication devices, but the communication fails even more.
It is easy to test this one-word communication method. Try to recall any previous communication and its response. In all likelihood, the response was a reaction to one word used in the conversation. There is no attempt to communicate back. It is just a reaction to a word that gained focus. This causes serious problems. In this form of communication, the frozen word ruins relationships.
There is another practical way to look at it, using a single example.
Privacy and Voicemail
Voicemail failed in India. It was launched repeatedly and failed every time. Several reasons are often proposed. Some point to infrastructure, noting that India moved directly from landlines to mobile. They suggest India skipped the answering machine era.
Others point to communication habits or the missed call. But these accounts do not reach the core. The true explanation is cultural and philosophical. In India, people understand that thoughts are transient. Thoughts are like waves.
In the West, particularly in the United States, it is different. People stick to a thought. They treat a frozen moment of intention as reliable. Voicemail assumes the thought you had at the moment of recording is worth preserving and acting on. It freezes a moment of intention.
But in India, by the time someone retrieves a voicemail, both people have already moved. The caller has second thoughts. The listener is in a different context. The recorded message now feels like an artifact from a stranger. So, people call back to renegotiate the thought in real time. This defeats the purpose of the recording.
In the American cultural model, a stated intention has contractual weight. You said it. It is on record. It holds. The message is a commitment. India runs on a more fluid epistemology. What I thought five minutes ago is not necessarily what I think now. Nobody finds that alarming or dishonest. It is just how minds work.
Voicemail froze something that was never meant to be frozen. It creates an unnegotiated and unilateral declaration.
Unilateral Declaration
Voicemail creates a culture where unilateral declaration passes as communication. You deliver the fact. You have technically informed. The relationship obligation feels discharged. But a real relationship runs on negotiation, not announcement.
The friction of having to speak to someone is not inefficiency. It is the relationship working. The West optimized that friction away and called it productivity. But in doing so, they created a tool that destroys connection.
This is visible in Western media, particularly in shows like The Good Wife. The plot pivots on a voicemail deleted by a third party. A decade of humiliation and endurance hinges on a message treated as delivered, but never heard.
In a culture where you must speak to the person, that deletion is impossible. The conversation either happens or it doesn’t. There is no illusion of communication that can be quietly sabotaged. Voicemail created a new kind of cruelty. It is the interception of a frozen thought before it can land.
India may have escaped voicemail and frozen messages, but it has to brace for the impact of frozen words.
The Missed Call
The missed call is often misunderstood. In India, it does not create a soft obligation. It creates zero obligation. One can miss a hundred calls a day. One is not responsible for them. You must catch me when you can. A missed call means nothing except in very close relationships.
This is an honest communication approach. If you reach me, we talk. If you do not, neither of us owes the other anything. There is no queue, no guilt, and no archived proof of attempted contact. Voicemail industrialized obligation. It created a paper trail of social debt.
Over time, India iterated through other options. Text messages were used, then abandoned. WhatsApp messages followed. Now, we have returned to the oldest system. We call a family member. We tell them to ask Z to call us back, as Z is not reachable.
We are back to the pre-mobile era. This system carries no record, no timestamp, and no read receipts. It is warm, human, and deniable by everyone in the chain.
But this may not work anymore. Missed calls can mean the end of a relationship. Non-communication is a new form of communication for Gen Z.
The missed call is their favorite way of communicating. Who has time to argue anymore? A missed call is the response to one frozen word from your earlier sentences. You may not know which word. You may or may not be told about it, but it will be dangling over the relationship for time to come.
At the end of Chapter 10, there was hope for humanity. The missed call makes it gloomy. But humanity has survived worse, such as slavery and bloodshed. It will survive this bug too.
Where does this take us in the next chapter? Any guesses?