This blog is different from others in that it is in the format of a conversation. I really did have this conversation — with ChatGPT1. I have only lightly edited its responses and have left my own responses nearly verbatim. I think this is an interesting way to present my thoughts and I might try more of this in the future2.
Host (ChatGPT): In a world where messages ping louder than thoughts and replies come faster than reflection, stepping away from a platform like WhatsApp isn’t just a technical decision — it’s a personal rebellion. Today, I will sit down with Mrigank who did what many only contemplate: he quit WhatsApp. Five months in, he shares the psychological weight, social friction, and digital clarity that came with that choice.
Host: Mrigank, you’ve thought about leaving WhatsApp many times before, but it wasn’t until recently that you actually did it. What finally pushed you to pull the plug?
Mrigank: To be fair, I have at least thought about this many times before. It is absurd how I have been able to take breaks, whenever I wanted, from other social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn — but not even once could I stop using WhatsApp since I first started using it at around 11 years old. The reason is that it’s just so difficult not to use WhatsApp! Doesn’t it sound absurd? But it is true. This time I decided not to think too much and just do it — and it’s been five months already! The reasons for this have been pretty clear to me for quite a while, and I hope we will delve into them in this conversation. But as such, there was no special reason this time. I just wanted to experiment and see for myself if it was possible to live without WhatsApp.
Host: It’s interesting how certain platforms become so ingrained in our daily lives that stepping away feels almost impossible. You noted that while you’ve taken breaks from other social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, WhatsApp was different. Could you delve deeper into what made WhatsApp uniquely challenging to leave compared to other platforms?
Mrigank: The simple answer is that WhatsApp has become the de facto means of communication in our lives. I agree that WhatsApp has brought immense convenience to our lives. People use WhatsApp to connect with their friends and family almost effortlessly. And it is very effective at what it does.
But this convenience has, in some sense, come back to bite us — and unfortunately, most people don’t even realize this. WhatsApp has started to be overused in many ways. It has become a part of our lives beyond what it needs to be. This could be school, university, or even work. In my school, for example, we would have several WhatsApp groups every year, including groups between students, parents, and teachers. Sometimes even groups for different classes, groups for extra-curricular activities, groups for student council, and whatnot. If you were not on WhatsApp, it would be impossible to keep up with what was going on. You might even miss important things because many announcements and discussions would be limited to WhatsApp alone. I have been in university for the last two and a half years, and it’s almost the same story here. There is a WhatsApp group for the entire batch, a group for B.Tech. students, a group for every student club, a common group for all clubs, a group for every upcoming event in the student clubs, a group for every hostel, a group for every mess — the list simply goes on when you think about it. Some time ago, even my university’s placement cell started a WhatsApp group with the students to send updates about the placement process and job opportunities.
Is WhatsApp truly the best way to communicate all these things? We have email, Microsoft Teams (my university has a subscription), and other platforms that are meant for such communication. There is a range of features on these platforms to create groups and sub-groups of people, and they are meant for this. I will want to emphasize email here. Do we even know how to effectively use email? It is an incredibly powerful tool and so much more reliable and effective for these use cases. We continue to use WhatsApp and allow it to slowly seep into our lives beyond what is healthy.
Host: What specific features, design decisions, or policies of WhatsApp did you find most problematic? Was it privacy and encryption concerns, the way groups are managed, notification overload, data‑sharing with Facebook, or something else entirely? How did those drive your decision to walk away?
Mrigank: Privacy, yes, is one of the concerns. But certainly not the most important one. Much more scary to me are some of the psychological concerns — we will get to that. After all, as far as our chats themselves are concerned, WhatsApp seems to be end-to-end encrypted. But the problem with privacy is more than this. For example, I have noticed in the past that somehow people I have never seen on Facebook, never searched their names, and have no mutual friends with, magically pop up in my friend suggestions on Facebook. I thought about this and realized that our only point of contact is that I have saved their number on my phone. And these are often absolutely random people — no way I had other connections with them. There is definitely something fishy going on, and it is obviously WhatsApp scooping up my contact list. The worst part is that there is no way to configure how many contacts WhatsApp can see. You either share all your contacts or none. And it’s not the best experience if no contacts at all are shared. There is no filtering either on who can message you on WhatsApp. Anyone can message you, and there is no way to stop them. I mean, yes, you can block them once they do message you, but that is not the point. So many companies have realized that unlike their texts on SMS, which almost always get blocked by spam filters, their WhatsApp messages will always get to us and will always get our attention.
WhatsApp is free and does not serve any advertisements — at least not yet. But you see how they have started showing us these things called “channels” where people can run somewhat of a social media handle on WhatsApp. With this and many other features, WhatsApp seems to be slowly becoming another Instagram. And just as such social media platforms harvest our data to manipulate us into consuming more content, I don’t think it is hard to imagine that WhatsApp could also do that very soon.
Host: You’ve hinted that privacy concerns are just the surface, and that there are more frightening, psychological effects that worry you. Could you expand on that? What kind of psychological harm do you think WhatsApp is causing—or has caused—in your own experience?
Mrigank: WhatsApp exploits the social wiring in our brains and converts our insecurities into impulsive patterns. Yes, one can mute, archive, and lock chats — but at the end of the day, once I hit the send button in any chat, my brain really starts waiting for a reply. There’s also a feeling that I’m being observed, and ironically, with my own consent. My contacts can see when I am online, whether I’ve received or read their messages, and so on. On email, I can read a message, think about it, and answer whenever I like. But on WhatsApp, I am afraid that I’ll be perceived as rude or careless if I were to read a message and not immediately reply.
Host: Can you talk a bit about how that constant pressure affected you, specifically? Did it change how you interacted with others, or how you experienced your time and attention? Did you ever catch yourself doing things—like checking the app obsessively, or drafting quick replies just to avoid guilt—that made you pause and reflect?
Mrigank: I will actually tell you another example. It seems contrived but trust me, it is very realistic. Say somebody sends me a message, and I don’t want to reply to them immediately. I will not open the chat so that they don’t think I might be ignoring them. But imagine we are both participants in some group. I can no longer open the group because I am aware that they can see my activity there — they can know when I read a message or replied to a message. The point that I’m trying to make is that it is really easy to fall prey to these kinds of things and eventually get pressured to reply as soon as possible. And to keep checking your phone for messages, even taking a look at archived chats every now and then, et cetera. I don’t think we should have to do these mental gymnastics. At least not so often. It should be easier for us to decide when to reply to which message. Ideally, this decision should be only affected by the importance of each message.
WhatsApp has a lack of fine-grained control when it comes to settings related to online status, read receipts, or which users can message me. It’s an all-or-none situation. Either everyone is allowed, or all my contacts, or nobody at all. And let me mention that WhatsApp reads my entire contact list. There’s no way to restrict that access to only a few contacts. And so “my contacts” is far from the optimum configuration for these things.
But the worst problem probably is the volume of clutter. Suppose I want to message my mother. I open WhatsApp to reach my chat with her. But on the way to my destination, in this case, my chat with my mother, WhatsApp will throw at me so many green blurbs with countless unread messages — messages from friends, messages from work, messages from people I don’t even properly know — that it would simply be impossible to reach my destination without taking a look at all these things. Unlike email, I cannot snooze messages or categorize them into folders. It is all a continuous stream of things being thrown at me. Even if I want to check an important work-related group chat, I will end up seeing updates on other work-related groups as well — so how do I focus? Many people often find themselves juggling between multiple chats simultaneously, talking to multiple people at once. It has become so hard to focus on one conversation at a time. The fact that things are synchronous and expected to be synchronous has made our communication space so cluttered.
Host: You’ve raised some critical points about WhatsApp’s evolution and its impact on our daily lives. It sounds like the platform has shifted from a simple communication tool to something far more complex and, as you mentioned, potentially intrusive. How do you feel about the alternatives you’ve adopted since leaving WhatsApp? Have they met your communication needs effectively?
Mrigank: Before I stopped using WhatsApp, I put a notice on my display picture and my status, saying that, well, I have stopped using WhatsApp, and that I will be available only on call, SMS, email, and Microsoft Teams. And these are pretty much the platforms that I have been using. I use Telegram with my parents — but exclusively with my parents — because it’s easier for them to make video calls this way. The point here is not Telegram. I could very well be using something else. What is of significance here is that it is exclusive, in both its purpose and the people who can serve that purpose. Telegram, yes, has its own privacy concerns. But for now, it lets me control which contacts it can read from my phone, or who exactly can send me messages. It also contains analogs to WhatsApp’s stories and channels, but such bloat is not pushed into my face and the overall experience is almost free from clutter.
Host: Do you feel like WhatsApp has changed how we think about communication itself? Like, has it rewired what we expect from conversations, or how we experience being available to others?
Mrigank: Personally, I have felt that I now have much more meaningful conversations with people I really care about. I don’t need to know a lot of things — just because it is easy, I don’t need to stay updated with everything that is going on. I also do not really need to say a lot of things — simply because it is convenient, I end up saying a lot more than I really need to. If there is something really important, I use SMS, email, or Microsoft Teams. And this has been working out pretty well. On the flip side, people who really want to talk to me reach out on these alternate platforms. I am very grateful to be around people who respect my choice. My mind feels much less cluttered. I have a lot more control over myself, over my phone, and over my digital habits. And to whatever messages I do receive, I respond much better. It has been really good to set boundaries between my different modes. I can now choose when I want to be in my work-mode, when I want to be in my family-mode, and when I want to be in my friends-mode. It is much easier to maintain such hygiene now.
Host: Would you say your relationship with your phone in general has changed since quitting WhatsApp? Like, do you find yourself unlocking it less? Or has your attention shifted to other apps?
Mrigank: I haven’t really shifted to other apps. As I said, the problem is not with WhatsApp itself. Today it is WhatsApp but if tomorrow it were to shut down, everyone would move to another application and the same things would happen there. In general, I have tried to minimize my social media surface altogether. I haven’t been using Facebook much, and maybe not at all in the last many months. I only sparingly use Instagram and LinkedIn. I have stopped opening Twitter as well. And, yes, I find myself unlocking my phone way less. When my phone buzzes, I know that it’s an important message. When I am not working, I know that I do not have to look at email or Microsoft Teams. It is much easier to know when to focus on what.
Host: Does it ever feel like you’re missing out on something?
Mrigank: I feel that most of us are quite helpless in this whole situation. Many people really have commitments that make it impossible to stop using WhatsApp. Everyone just expects everyone else to be using WhatsApp. I had to convince myself that even if something seemed to go wrong when I stopped using WhatsApp, it would be a much smaller concern than all the other concerns I mentioned. Yes, I do sometimes find it hard to catch up with people. However, I feel that it’s okay — I have to make a little more effort at a personal level, for instance, by calling them on the phone or meeting them in person, but these are much healthier forms of communication than mindless texting. Yes, it is a little less convenient, but as I have been saying, convenience is the devil. This little inconvenience is worth it.
Host: Do you think social media, messaging apps, and the general hyperconnectivity culture are contributing to stress, anxiety, or detachment from more meaningful experiences in life?
Mrigank: As I said, I can now have much more honest and thoughtful conversations. There’s a lot more of me in my words. Behind screens and behind keyboards, we are just not the same people. I too have said things on WhatsApp that I doubt I would have said in person. This is the case with many of us. The same convenience that makes it easy to do nice things also makes it possible to effortlessly do things we would regret if we were to look back. And in general, there is so much pressure to respond quickly. There is hardly any time to think, ponder about what we’re going to say, or decide whether we really want to or need to say it. WhatsApp feeds our impulsive nature, and we continue to let it do so.
Host: Finally, what broader lesson would you share about our relationship with communication apps?
Mrigank: I feel that people need to deeply think about these issues. People need to check if the apps that they use every day for their convenience are now consuming them. People need to think about what boundaries they must draw for these apps in their personal and professional lives, and whether these apps are respecting these boundaries at all. For example, we need to decide whether we are okay with waking up in the morning, taking out our phone to greet our family, and ending up scrolling through messages from our workplace, or messages from any of the many irrelevant things on WhatsApp. We all need to decide for ourselves, whether we own ourselves, or is it our phones that own us.
Host: As we end this conversation, one thing is clear—this isn’t just about quitting an app. It’s about stepping back, re-evaluating our habits, and asking what kind of attention, presence, and relationships we really want. Mrigank’s reflections remind us that logging out isn’t an escape—it can be a return. To intention, to clarity, and maybe, to life as it unfolds, unfiltered.