Author: Justin Adams

We’ve all seen this in Slack or Teams or iMessage, right?

An unnecessary heart Tapback. This is a colleague ❤️ing a text about some follow-up after a sales call.

A ❤️ means love, right? You ❤️ your spouse when their plane is about to take off. You ❤️ a cute photo of your kids or a dog playing in the snow. You can even ❤️ sad things because your ❤️ goes out to eulogies or cancers.

But these ❤️s are being used instead of a thumbs up, which is confirming that something is true, or that someone agrees to a statement or question or request. You don’t love when someone answers a true or false questions about a software feature you’re developing for patient monitoring. If you did, that ❤️ is close to an HR violation!

This reminds me a bit of the premature honey from Curb, where Richard calls his new girlfriend honey weeks after they’ve started dating, and she nearly walks because the implication is that he is high maintenance or overly attached.

While I love the rapid evolution of visual and text-based language, I think some restraint is important, otherwise, if we’re ❤️ing that we received emails or ❤️ing that a meeting has started and a colleague is running later, what do we do when we actually want to ❤️ something with emotional resonance?

I don’t like the shrugging emoji. I notice that people use it when they link to an article or have a perspective that they know nothing about and is controversial, and then they add a shrugging emoji as if to say, “Who knows?”. And I’m like… “Not you, clearly”, but maybe the experts or a specialists?

🤷‍♂️?

I’ve noticed a verbal tick in society when people are answering a question. It’s as if the speed of input is too fast, so people attempt to speed up their output, but their brains haven’t figured out whether they’re using the negative sentence construction (“No, I’m not ready for that.”) or the positive sentence construction (“Yea, I’m not sure I’m ready for that.”), and so they waffle at the beginning.

Although I’m sure there is some psychological explanation for this, it seems more prevalent across younger (< 50 years old) age groups.