Why I don’t like voice messages

When someone sends a voice message, it is an act of staggering presumption: asking for uninterrupted minutes of my finite, dwindling life — at their pace, on their subject — operating under the wild assumption that I have free time and a working set of earphones at hand, when really, I have neither.

Situational constraints

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I am rarely in a position to actually listen.

Maybe I’m in class. Maybe I’m on a crowded bus, glancing at my phone from inside my bag, because if I hold a phone out in the open on public transport, some miscreant may reach over and take it right out of my hands. Maybe I’m just in front of other people. In none of those situations can I press play on a four-minute audio clip.

No shortcuts

With texts, I can go through the whole thing in about a second – skim the first line, get the gist, and decide if it’s worth my full attention. But for voice messages, I have to listen to the entire thing to find out what it’s about.

Always veers off-topic

Writing takes work, so people have to slow down and consider if something’s actually worth mentioning. Voice messages skip that step entirely. Most of the time, what arrives is someone’s unfiltered internal monologue in real time. No structure, no edits; just whatever crosses their mind, in whatever order it crosses it.

I once asked someone whether they were free the following day. Surely, it’s a simple yes-or-no question. What I got back was a 50-minute account of everything currently wrong with their life, filled with tangents that had nothing to do with the following day or with me.

Too much, too often

People who send voice messages regularly send ones that run 5, 10, 15 minutes — several times a day. It requires Herculean effort and the patience of a saint to just get through the whole thing.

Even playing it at double speed doesn’t really help much. For one, it just makes them sound like they’re aggressively yelling at me. For another, it requires greater concentration to follow.

Some of them switch formats mid-conversation, without any prior warning: texting one second, voice-messaging the next. By the time I’ve replied to one of them, 15 more have already arrived.

Missed details

I have the attention span of a fruit fly, and even that’s being generous. When someone’s been going on and on for aeons, I zone out and often miss the only detail that mattered — a schedule change, a quiz announcement — buried in forty minutes of preamble.

Sometimes this lands me in a pickle. Sometimes it lands me in friend drama: “Wait, so you don’t listen to any of my voice messages?”

No searchability

Say I need to find something specific. If they’d used their hands to type it, I could find it in seconds. Instead, I’m scrolling through an obscene number of identical audio bubbles, with no way to know which is which without replaying all of them. Pinning doesn’t help either. Now I just have 50 pinned voice messages and no way to tell them apart.

I have never sent a voice message in my life, and I don’t intend to start now. But, dearest gentle reader, if you love sending them, that’s entirely your prerogative. This isn’t an intervention. Send all the voice messages you want. Just do me a teeny tiny favour and lose my number. Please and thank you.