u/According_Egg1289

So I constantly share little things about my life with my friends, but the problem is that they never reply. I have been told that their lives are simply a lot busier than mine, and they pretty much made me feel like the "unemployed" friend of the group.

Now I, too, am busy; I do have a lot of projects to work on, and I share bits and pieces of that with them. I don't know if it is because it is the repeated content that stops them from engaging with my messages/ updates, but whatever their reasoning is, be it good or bad, I want to stop constantly sharing things with them because I know I will not get a reply, I will end up wasting my time by constantly reaching out to my phone and see if they have replied to me.

It is dopamine I am chasing here, constantly reaching for my phone, checking whether they have engaged or not. It’s bad. I want it to stop.

So I have been in a friend group for more than 10 years, and they are really good people. I do love them a lot. I live abroad now, and most of my friends too (we're all scattered across the globe). And whenever I reach out to them to share something small about my day or maybe something a tad bit more important to me, they barely reply.

I am not the best at texting, and I am especially bad at group chats. I will admit that I hate it when people suddenly vanish mid-conversation or say that they will reply to my messages, and I wait. The thing about that is I constantly check whether they have seen my messages, because the chances of them leaving it unseen on the GC are pretty high, especially if someone starts a conversation after I send something. My message is bound to get missed by everyone (it is the art of GC's after all, chaotic), there have been many times I send something i am excited about, and they never read and reply to them, and if I bring it up, they would say things like "how come you never tell this to us?"... I literally did, though?

It has come to a point that I keep sending them things despite knowing that they will not go through my messages, and I constantly check my phone to see if I have gotten a reply. I get so distracted, and I procrastinate on a lot of tasks because of this.

I have spoken about this to them, and it's been 2 years since then, and they're still the same. When I initially spoke to them about my problem, they told me to be understanding of their busy lives and that they get overwhelmed when they see so many messages on the group chat. One said that she's afraid to text on the group chat because I tend to call them out for never replying to them (I'd say out of everyone in the group, she's the one who genuinely never opens the GC).

It made me feel like I am the least understanding, and also felt like my life is really not that busy compared to that (I am a student currently working two jobs and living alone, so I have a lot on my plate, but I wouldn't say it is THE MOST busiest life, people are having it harder than me for sure), and almost felt like I was labelled as the "unemployed" friend of the friend group.

I was also told that they open the group chat out of muscle memory, and then they forget where they last read it... I think it is not a good sign, probably worth doing some mindfulness practices there.

I mean, I guess my constant need to see if they have replied to whatever I say and my need to constantly share things with them, despite knowing how I won't like the outcome, and always being distracted because of them, is also worth practising mindfulness on? I am a bit stuck here. I have spoken to a few other people, and they all told me to stop sharing, ofc be the one that will reply to them, but don't engage further because I would always end up being hurt.