When you are not texting someone one on one, and instead are texting to a number of people within a group, there can be a tendency for some to message and “participate” a lot more than others. And what also can easily happen is that people simply will text about what they care about, which no one else cares about, and send messages into a dark hole that no one will really read and will actually just ignore. That’s basically what’s happened with a group text among two of my cousins, my uncle, and me.

Here are the general themes among how each person here participates:

Cousin 1: This cousin has never really fully matured, though he is 48 years old now. He has no idea how to properly communicate, and as a psychotherapist I follow on Instagram recently wrote, communication is not a skill we are born with; instead, it requires us being taught and actively learning how to do it well to best express ourselves and be heard. Those who have not matured in this area tend to become very poor at self expression and end up “expressing” themselves by complaining all the time. This is this cousin, who is not only a poor communicator, but also openly racist and basically thinks everyone of every race is bad except Chinese Americans (he frequently criticizes Chinese immigrants). All his texts are about complaining about how White people steal opportunity from Asians (specifically males), Black and White people don’t believe in wearing masks during the pandemic, and Indian people love to throw people under the bus at work. Everyone else is always at fault and he’s always innocent. He’s also awful at confrontation and basically invites poor treatment.

Cousin 2: This cousin is pretty benign. He may respond to a benign message, and he will also share photos of food he has either cooked or eaten at a nice restaurant.

Uncle: My uncle is also openly racist against pretty much all race groups, but particularly any immigrants and Chinese from China. He’s a Trump supporter who frequently shares Fox News articles that criticize and unfairly blame Biden or Harris or Obama for whatever incident is being reported, and talks about how bad “illegals” are in this country, as they are the number 1 reason for the increasing crime rates supposedly everywhere here. He goes on rants that are paragraphs long over text about how incompetent “liberals” and Democrats are, particularly Biden, Harris, Obama, and California governor Gavin Newsom. However, he categorizes himself as a “libertarian” and believes both in vaccines and in masks.

Me: I basically don’t respond or contribute to any conversation and am just a bystander who occasionally scrolls through their messages, but I recognize none of them care about each others’ messages.

At the rate we are going, we should just cancel the group text and tell each person to talk to themselves.