Unsending messages is for cowards

We’re watching the slow, pitiful death of an art form right in front of us, and, of course, no one cares.

The art form in question? A classic “sorry, wrong person” text message. Gone are the days of “accidentally” messaging an ex to sneak back in their psyche. We’ve heard the final story of someone mistakenly sexting their parents when they meant to sext their lover. The world is empty of the drama produced by a shit-talk text accidentally sent to the person being shat on.

An unintended text faces no consequences anymore. You can unsend your messages on just about every platform now. Where is the serendipity in that? Where is the whimsy? Where is the joy???

The first time someone tried to unsend a message to me, it did not go as planned. My buddy, multitasking unsuccessfully, was texting me and his girlfriend at the same time. Naturally, he sent me a selfie of him with their cat. He panicked and unsent it, but it was too late — because I was on my phone already, and I’d already seen it before the unsend took root. And thank God, because the cat is cute (shoutout to Wizard) and the photo was funny.

But then, there it was: the ghost of the message, a little scar on my screen. “Michael unsent a message,” it read, in place of the cat photo. My response hung there, dangling, now tragically divorced from the visual that had inspired it. The memory of the cat was still there, but only in the way that La Croix is kind of raspberry flavored.

In 2017, the secure messaging apps Telegram and WhatsApp were the first to commit this crime against spontaneity by allowing users to unsend messages. In 2022, Apple followed suit, allowing users a full two minutes of regret time to decide to erase a text. Eventually Instagram, never one to be left out, joined in on the fun, too.

At first, unsending messages was like any other technological advancement we were told we needed but didn’t: It was unnoticeable. I rarely unsent messages, and people rarely unsent them to me. But lately, it’s everywhere. We’re living in an invisible unsending epidemic.

Of course, you can always think before you type and send, like you can think before you speak. But allowing people to take something back so quickly, either upon realizing the reaction wasn’t what they wanted or that sending the message actually filled them with regret? It’s lame. It’s sad. And, worst of all, it’s cowardly.

To be clear, I am not calling you a loser if you unsend texts. I understand that we are encouraged to use the tools available to us. If you’re doing it for comedic effect — like people do by editing messages — I even respect it. But I do blame the system that has made this behavior acceptable.

The good ol’ “whoops, meant to say this” or the “wrong person” are vanishing from our lives, and in their place? A cold, relentless demand for perfection. We’re losing something essential here: the tiny, beautiful acknowledgment that we are all, without exception, idiots sometimes.

It erases a necessary, if crushing, understanding of what it means to live with precarity; with consequences; with the tender, awkward dance of living in a world where you can’t always take things back.

The ability to unsend messages reflects this cultural craving for control. It gives off this unrealistic illusion that you really can revise your life. Just click unsend! Give yourself a second, third, fourth chance! But that contributes to this unholy pressure to curate our every word, our every typo, our every photo of us with our cat. And the worst part? This ability to erase mistakes is making us forget what it means to live with the constant, thrilling dread of messing up. In other words, it’s helping us forget we’re human.

And, of course, there’s a darker side to this. After Telegram added the feature, one Reddit user wrote in a post that this is practically a gift-wrapped present for gaslighters. It makes sense: Gaslighting is a specific kind of manipulation that focuses on making victims question their own memory and, eventually, sanity. That text never said that; that text was never there.

“Frequently, it is used in relationships, for example when an individual is cheating on their partner, comes home late and makes their partner believe that they’ve always come home at this time. The new update makes manipulating chats (and, in addition, memories) extremely easy,” the user wrote.

The user noted that adding the “message deleted” indicators do help, but just because a message was sent and deleted doesn’t mean you can’t still sow seeds of doubt about the messages actual intent.

I don’t have any grand conspiracies about unsent messages destroying civilization, but, my God, I hate it. Ultimately, where’s the fun in writing your apology before the mess even gets out?