Your Wife & Kids Hate Your Async Business
How your text, audio, and video-messaging habits may be eroding your time, attention, and relationships—and what to do about it.
For centuries and eons, human relationships existed in one place: inside of whole, dedicated time together.
Conversations existed nowhere else. Collaborative work existed nowhere else.
Nowadays, it can be impossible to meet up with someone, while at the same time, effortless to have 13 private conversations happening simultaneously in your living room from the palm of your hand.
No one in history ever carried on 13 private conversations—simultaneously—in their living room.
We have been sold the lie that our physical, real-world ability to be present and engaged in one place at one time with one activity or person—that is, to be limited—is a problem and life-threateningly inefficient.
And we have been sold the lie that a solution for that problem is something called “asynchronous communication” — a fancy phrase for “text, audio, and video-messaging.”
(Now before you freak out… no, this is not an essay about throwing your phone out or forsaking modern messaging capability. Keep reading.)1
What is Async?
A quick search brings this definition up:
asynchronous — adjective
Not simultaneous; not concurrent in time; — opposed to synchronous.
chronologically misplaced; belonging to a different time or era.
I first heard this phrase reviewing an app that aims to make coaching, consulting, and similar meetings possible without finding a mutual time to meet together in the same room virtually or physically: “Send it when you can, receive it when you can, respond when you can,” essentially.
As I reviewed this app, I wondered:
Is it actually a beneficial thing for humanity to solve a real time-problem by encouraging asynchronous relationship and the further fracturing of time and relational attention?
Is there such a thing as a real relationship that is not simultaneous, not concurrent in time, and is chronologically misplaced?
God Can Async…
I leaned the question against God:
Is God available for me to talk to Him for 5 to 20 seconds at a time while in the middle of an activity that does not otherwise require my full attention?
Yeah, absolutely.
Does God respond to what I share with Him in those seconds-long bursts of communication?
He sure can.
(…and often does, even though He might not respond in that exact moment I “send Him a message.”)
But is having a conversation-thread scattered throughout chronologically-disparate moments of time… is that a replacement for a whole, dedicated time for meeting with the Most Valuable Person in my life?
Absolutely not.
Spending dedicated, in-person time alone with God—that being the sole purpose of the time and attention—is an entirely different experience than sending Him a two-minute audio message in the middle of the day.
That one-on-one time with Him is indescribably valuable, and irreplaceable by that which is split up and scattered throughout the day.
Async in History
In all the history of humanity, you could not have a conversation with another person while you were doing something else—unless they were standing in the same room or within earshot.
Even if you were to write someone letters or send them carrier pigeons, you had to sit down and apply your full focus to writing that letter, to sending it to them, and only then afterward, going about your next item of business.
Unless you were an actual sorcerer, at no point in human history could you be on a walk in the mountains with your wife, suddenly turn away from her, start speaking into the air, and with efficacy, tell someone (or multiple other people) on the other side of the world that you will meet them on Tuesday at 3pm EST to discuss upcoming trade agreements…
…and then turn back to your wife and continue your walk, as if nothing happened.
This is the actual reality of what happens when you pull out your phone and respond to a client in the middle of some activity that would otherwise only include your wife and/or your kids.
How Async Can Affect Your Family, Spiritually
When you do that, something real does happen.
Just because the clients with whom you are asynchronously relating are not physically walking along with you and your wife on a hike does not mean that your attention—spiritually—is not doing the same thing as if they were on a walk with you.
Your attention is at least trying to do the same thing as if they were there on a walk with you, except because they are not on the walk with you, all you are doing is spiritually fracturing a time-space reality that was designed to be a whole, sealed up, contained, limited realm of experience.
With this, you are no longer “alone“ when you are alone.
That’s not just a trite phrase.
Through your phone, everybody you have allowed free-access to you actually has free access to you—all the time, on a spiritual level.
There is a real reason social media feels so draining. There is a real reason you feel terrible after talking to certain people, or continuing to allow them access to you, even if only via a yet-to-be-blocked phone number.
Whether they’ve told you or not, your wife and kids know this reality deeply.
They knows when you’re “somewhere else”—even while you are sitting at home. They knows what it feels like to be enjoying your presence and then suddenly feel your attention shatter into fourteen different message threads, never to regain that time again which could have continued in wholeness and delight together.
Even though you believe async is a solution for your time and scheduling limitations… without proper boundaries, async will only give you the appearance of a solution. It will transfer the problem into another form, fracturing what ought to be one of the most primary, important, and whole relationships in your life: your marriage and family.
The Reality of Boundaries, Commitment, Containment
