At some point, without anyone deciding, It is no longer acceptable to send a dry message in a WhatsApp group. “Ok” became hostile, “okay” became sharp and a simple “understood” was almost a declaration of someone seeking war.
So we learned to quilt:
- To put the “👍” after the “ok”.
- The “😊” after a request.
- The “hahaha” before an opinion that could upset.
Not because we felt laughter, approval or tenderness. But because the message without emoji is the message that must be interpreted. And in a culture like Spain, interpreting is dangerous.
The emoji has become mandatory emotional punctuation. It doesn’t convey what you feel, but yespoint out what you don’t want the other to suspect. The “😂” rarely means that you found something funny. It means: this is a joke, don’t take it the wrong way, I’m not being rude, I’m still being nice. It is a safe conduct. A social insurance policy.
Same with the “hahaha.” No one laughs when writing it, it’s just a tone marker, a way of saying: relax, this isn’t serious, we’re still friends. The more jots, the more eager the attempt to smooth out.
- “Ha” is dry.
- “Haha” is minimally polite.
- “Hahaha” is cordial.
- “Hahahaha” is nervous.
- “HAHAHAHA” is desperate.
We have built a parallel language to avoid the conflict that never comes. Because there is almost never real conflict. Only the fear that there is. And that fear has inflated every message until it becomes a dance of false preventive emotions.
The result is a hollowed-out language. When everything has emoji, none of them mean anything. When everything ends in “hahaha”, the laughter disappears. When all messages are warm, warmth becomes background noise.
But we can’t stop. Because the first one to stop putting the “😊” will be the edge. The weird one. The one who “always answers dryly.” In the whatsapp groups Spaniards, cordiality is mandatory. And what is obligatory, by definition, is not cordial.
It’s a perfect trap: To show that you are not hostile, you have to overact kindness. And when everyone overreacts, it is no longer possible to distinguish who is really nice from who is simply following the protocol. The emoji, which was born to add emotion to the text, has ended up anesthetizing it.
Perhaps the clearest symptom is the “❤️”. A heart. The symbol of love, of deep affection. Today we sent it to confirm that we received a PDF. We use it to close a conversation without having to actually respond. It has become what “sincerely” was to the letters of yesteryear: a closing formula that means absolutely nothing. As the impersonal ‘Merry Christmas’ that any company sends you by email.
In a few years, someone will study the WhatsApp groups of this era and believe that we lived in a society of overflowing affection. Emojis everywhere. Constant laughter. Hearts all the time.
You won’t know it was the opposite. That we inflated words precisely because we no longer trusted them. That we filled the messages with emotion because we had stopped feeling it.
And that “hahaha”, in the end, was our way of saying: I don’t know what to tell you, but I’m still here.
Ha ha ha.
Featured image | Xataka with Mockuuups Studio
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