"Hey, how are you doing?" And back... nothing. Silence. Crickets. Tumbleweed rolling through the background. Then, four days later: "Sorry, been busy" — something just enough of a reply to keep the conversation technically alive.

Not so long ago, leaving someone on read was widely seen as one of the rudest things you could do online. Today, it feels almost normal. Somewhere between deliberately ignoring someone and disappearing completely, we have created a new form of communication — soft ghosting.

Before we go any further, I am willing to bet on two things. First, you have been soft ghosted at least a few times. Second, you have probably done it yourself — perhaps more than once, and perhaps without even realising it.

So why has soft ghosting become so common? Is this a global shift in the way we communicate, or does it feel particularly widespread in places like the UAE? And perhaps the bigger question: is this just another passing digital habit, or are we witnessing a new social norm?

We tend to think of ghosting as a dating phenomenon — and for good reason. That is where the term first entered the mainstream. The logic was simple: you joined a dating app. the matches rolled in — ten, give or take. The dates followed — another ten, roughly. Before long, everyone you would met had been sorted into three neat piles: the ones you genuinely liked, the ones you might give another chance, and the ones who were simply a no.

That last pile was the awkward one. Nobody wanted to make the call or send the "It is not you, I just don't feel it" message. So most people chose the easier option: silence. No long explanations, no uncomfortable conversations. Dating apps were built for volume, not vulnerability; they encouraged you to keep swiping, not to write a thoughtful goodbye to every almost-match.

Then the 2020s happened. The pandemic didn't invent ghosting, but it accelerated something much bigger: our conversations moved online. Work chats replaced office catch-ups, friendships shifted to messaging apps, freelance relationships became almost entirely digital. Ghosting escaped dating and quietly entered every corner of everyday communication.

By the time 2025 arrived, soft ghosting no longer felt like something unusual. We stopped calling it ghosting. Instead, we told ourselves a kinder story: they are probably just busy. Silence no longer felt like rejection; it became an ordinary delay. Somewhere along the way, soft ghosting stopped being an exception and became a social norm.

Fast forward to the middle of 2026, and not much has changed. We are still living in the era of soft ghosting — only now it feels less like an exception and more like the default way we communicate.

Okay, so we know where soft ghosting came from. We even know how it spilled over into other areas of life. But why did it suddenly boom in 2025? And why, halfway through 2026, are we still stuck in it?

Here is the thing: today's technological landscape has created the perfect conditions for soft ghosting to thrive. And here is why.

1. Technology created a massive emotional overload

In other words, we are just tired.

Go on, open all your messages and count them. How many are "almost active" — the kind where you texted yesterday and are expected to text again today? Speaking for myself: family — four. Friends — four. Work — six. Then there is all the little stuff that keeps popping up: deliveries, the drum class admin, someone asking a quick question. And that is without counting email (hundreds, obviously) or Instagram DMs. At an absolute minimum, we are already juggling around twenty conversations.

The problem isn't only the number of conversations. It is how often we are pulled away from them. Microsoft's Work Trend Index found that the average knowledge worker is interrupted by a digital notification roughly every two minutes during the working day — emails, instant messages, calendar alerts, app notifications, the lot. Gloria Mark's research at the University of California adds the sting in the tail: once we are interrupted, it takes around twenty minutes before we finally return to the task we were originally doing.

No wonder our attention to messages has taken a nosedive. Every notification competes with every conversation, every interruption pushes replies further down the queue, and if we answered everything the moment it arrived, we would never get any work done.

2. Messaging apps removed the deadline

We are living in the era of "better to text than call," and I don't think I need to send you a link for that one — you already know it in your bones. The shift from calls to messages hasn't just delayed the deadline for replying, it has dissolved it entirely.

If someone calls, you either pick up or you don't — a clear decision, then and there. If someone texts, well, you have time. Even in a corporate setting, replying to something urgent within 10 minutes feels acceptable, and 30 - 40 minutes for something non-urgent is practically instant. And with friends, family, or — worse — near-strangers? The clock barely exists at all.

3. Communication became infinite

Do you still start your messages with "Hi"? I bet that, if you are anything like me, the answer is no more often than yes. Because when you text, you are never really starting a conversation — or finishing one. It feels more like jumping back into a chain that has been running for days, weeks or even months.

Researchers have a name for this phenomenon: ambient communication. They argue that messaging no longer happens in distinct moments but exists constantly in the background of everyday life, rather like background music or even the weather. And if communication is always there, why shouldn't it happen on a Saturday afternoon? Or at midnight? Or during someone's wedding? If a person can't reply now, they will do it later. If they can, they will.

And perhaps that is the biggest consequence of ambient communication. Once communication stopped feeling intrusive, we quietly abandoned one of the oldest rules of etiquette: don't interrupt people. We normalised messaging anyone, anytime. Soft ghosting wasn't an accident. It was the social rule we created to survive the communication culture we built.

4. The cost of ignoring someone has almost disappeared

A decade ago, failing to reply carried an implicit social penalty: it was widely interpreted as rude and hurtful. Today, silence is increasingly met with a different assumption: they are busy, overwhelmed, exhausted — they will get back to me eventually. In other words, we have become remarkably good at explaining away other people's absence.

I noticed this myself recently. I messaged someone about a work matter. No reply. I followed up a few days later. Still nothing. Then, a week later, we happened to bump into each other at a café. The unanswered messages never came up. There was no apology, no awkwardness, no explanation. We simply carried on with the conversation as though nothing had happened.

That tiny interaction says more about the rise of soft ghosting than any survey could. It doesn't suggest that people have become less considerate. Rather, it shows how the social norms surrounding communication have shifted. The expectation that every message deserves a response has quietly weakened, and with it, the social pressure to provide one.

There is no denying that soft ghosting is a thoroughly global trend. But perhaps it is simply the rule that "you feel it most where you live it" — or perhaps there is something particular to this region. Either way, in the UAE, soft ghosting doesn't feel like an occasional annoyance. It feels like the weather. It is just the climate you operate in.

So why does it feel more pronounced here?

1. The transience is built into the postcode

The UAE is a country where expats make up roughly 90% of the population, and a great many of them aren't here to stay forever — they are here for the next move. If you live in Dubai, you will have heard the phrase "Dubai is one big departure lounge" more times than you can count. And that quietly reshapes accountability: they will probably move on, you will probably move on, and by the end of the day, you have really only known this person for a fortnight. Why invest in follow-through when the whole premise is transit?

2. Work has fully colonised WhatsApp

In much of Europe, work communication is still institutionally cordoned off — email here, Teams there, personal messaging kept firmly separate. In the UAE, WhatsApp has become the default channel for practically everyone: recruiters, estate agents, clinics, customer service, your landlord, the man who fixed your AC once in 2023. By the end of the day, you have got thirty notifications sitting in one inbox, all wearing the same green icon, none of them clearly labelled "personal" or "professional." Everything blurs into everything else — including your standards for who deserves a reply.

3. The boom of the voice notes.

We have gone into this in more depth here, but the short version: the Middle East has a genuine love affair with the voice note. And here is the maths — replying to "how are you?" takes three seconds. Replying to a two-minute voice note takes... considerably longer, plus the social nerve to actually press play in public. Guess which one is more likely to get answered?

Put it all together — with social media penetration in the UAE sitting at around 99%, the highest of any country on earth — and digital communication here isn't a lifestyle choice. It is the only option on the table. None of this makes the UAE the epicentre of soft ghosting. It just makes it nearly impossible to escape.

Here is something you should know before we go any further: everything above could easily read as me handing out absolution to ghosters everywhere. And look — that is probably not entirely inaccurate. I am one of them, occasionally, even as I try to keep it in check. So in the interest of balance, here is the less comfortable truth, the one that might make you think twice next time your thumb hovers over "seen": soft ghosting can hurt. Genuinely, measurably hurt.

There is a well-known piece of research behind this: the Cyberball experiment. Participants believed they were playing a simple online ball-tossing game with two other people. Partway through, the other "players" simply stopped throwing them the ball — a small, manufactured moment of social exclusion. While this was happening, researchers scanned the participants' brains using fMRI.

What they found was striking: being excluded activated the same regions involved in the emotional experience of pain. Put simply: your brain doesn't draw a particularly clean line between a stubbed toe and being left on read.

And here is the paradox. In a place like Dubai — where soft ghosting has more structural excuses to exist than almost anywhere else — it may actually sting more, not less. Strip away all the everyday psychological noise, and you are left with a very simple fact: in a city where everyone is constantly arriving and leaving, the need to belong doesn't shrink. If anything, it gets louder. Even the faintest signal of exclusion can register as something real.

So does this mean you should scramble to respond to every message from every person, at all hours, until you burn out entirely?

No. But a few small rules go a long way.

1. If you know you won't reply soon, acknowledge the message. Even a quick "Seen this — I will get back to you tomorrow" removes uncertainty.

2. If you ve accidentally ghosted someone, don't overthink the comeback. A simple "sorry" is usually enough.

3. If the answer is "no", just say "no". (Good advice. Now try applying it to your own life, Barbara.)

4. Match your response to the relationship. Your closest friends, colleagues and family deserve more certainty than a stranger on LinkedIn.

5. If you don't want to be ghosted yourself, respect other people's boundaries. Not every message needs to be sent at night. Almost any work task can wait until Monday. People are far more likely to respond when they don't feel pressured to do so on someone else's schedule.