A truth universally acknowledged: life is busy. We have jobs to work and commutes to make, dinners to cook, bodies to move and houses to clean, not to mention myriad other projects and plans that demand space within the finite borders of our lives. 

Amid all this busyness, it can be hard to make time for each other. Even though time spent connecting with others is proven to make us both happier and live longer, in our packed schedules, it’s often the first to go. 

Enter the group chat. Whether it's a WhatsApp thread with family or a Messenger group with friends, group chats are where many of us turn to organise logistics, share regular banter and squeeze a bit of juice into our social cups. Alongside direct one-to-one messaging, most of us have at least one ongoing, semi-regular messaging thread with a group of people close to us.

If you’re a chronically online yapper like me, you have five.

These group chats are virtual spaces that provide a crucial link to the people we care about. And while some complain of constant notifications or the artifice of digital connection altogether, I, for one, would happily give away almost all my modern conveniences (including UberEats; goodbye criminally overpriced bento box) if it meant I could keep my group chats. I love them.

I love my family WhatsApp, where we organise dinners and birthdays and send regular updates of the dog. Look, he’s sleeping. Look, he’s sleeping again.

I love my Facebook Messenger chat with close friends in my city, organising weekend plans and sharing weird dreams and discussing how to style cowboy boots. 

I love my group chat with ex-colleagues of a toxic workplace, sending memes and inside jokes from different, psychologically healthier offices, in different corners of the world. 

I even love the chat that exists entirely for the purpose of sharing and trash-talking each other’s Wordle scores.

These chats are woven into the very fabric of my life. In my lunch break, I can use them to console a friend about her sick dog and congratulate another friend on a promotion. On very busy days, I can catch up on the back-and-forth on the commute home, enjoying some of the benefits of conversation even when not actively participating, snort-laughing at their jokes on the bus. 

When something good or bad happens, a group chat with my closest friends is often my first port-of-call. It’s no substitute for a walk together in the park or a leisurely catch up over red wine and pasta, but it is something. Group chats give me a sense, as I go about my day, of belonging to an ongoing, omnipresent community, just a few taps away.

Kate Mannell, a media studies Research Fellow at Deakin University, has investigated the experience and implications of group chat communication. She calls the ubiquitous chatter an “ambient presence” – a phenomenon that group chats only amplify.

“Group chats extend out into a sense of ambient presence of your wider social connection,” she tells me. “You don't need a long conversation on the phone or to write a letter, you can just keep in touch in small ways across the day.”

In her research, Kate interviewed a number of young university students about their experience with group chats and discovered “a lot of really beautiful stories about group chats being really important sites of ongoing support.”

She also found evidence that group chats can alleviate some of the stress or guilt associated with direct one-to-one messaging. “There's less pressure to respond [than one-on-one] because you're part of a group that's being communicated with.” 

It’s something I see every day in my own inbox. With good friends, these collective threads can be a form of crowdsourced support, no one left overburdened, and no one left behind.

Group chats do have their critics. 

Certain personalities may find it harder to avoid overwhelm or feel anxiety about speaking up in groups. Similarly, each group is likely to have its own cadence and etiquette – unspoken rules by which friendships are cemented or social faux pas are committed – the learning curve of which may be hard to navigate. What if you’re close with some people, but not others? What if your friendships in real life have drifted away, but the group chat remains?

Part of the tension here, Mannell posits, is due to transposing the fluid, porous nature of real-life social connection onto technology that dictates rigid boundaries. Instead of slowly slinking away at a party, group chats force us to announce our exit in a way that feels oddly formal and permanent.

I was confronted with this reality recently, after a close friendship broke down and the group chats to which we both belonged became fraught, tenuous places of calculated presence and absence, of engaging with others but never each other. It was far from ideal, and posed a question to which I have yet to find a suitable answer: who gets the group chat in the divorce?

When the first text message was sent, a simple ‘Merry Christmas’ between two Vodafone software developers in December 1992, we had no idea the extent to which our relationships would stand to change.

Now, with the subsequent invention, proliferation and enshitiffication of social media, our chats remain one of the last online refuges from marketing and advertising, an online ‘third space’. And while signs on the horizon seem to threaten this sanctity – with Meta placing advertising in the Messenger inbox and Stories, and WhatsApp considering similar changes – our message threads remain, for now, safe havens from capitalist interlopers. 

In turn, group message threads encourage the building of regular touchpoints of community into our daily lives, with benefits beyond siloed conversations or once-yearly awkward coffee catch ups. They offer the possibility to deepen existing relationships, and even in some circumstances, the chance to create new relationships all together. Several close friendships I have now were once relatively unknown names on a group chat screen, added by a mutual friend. 

It deserves restating that there is no substitute for deep, vulnerable face-to-face conversation. Group messaging comes with its own challenges, and is not a panacea for the loneliness epidemic, the fractured architecture of our cities, the proliferation of Western individualism, or the unrelenting expectations of capitalism on our time and sanity. 

However, while there are many voices decrying our device-dependent lifestyles and the harms of social media, I would like to add one voice to the fray that says otherwise.

When done correctly – as an extension to authentic and meaningful offline relationships – I do believe the humble group chat can be a place to offer some of the best things money can’t buy: connection, community and care. One message at a time.