There is a particular kind of relief in watching a phone’s notification badge climb past ninety unread messages and simply not looking. For a growing number of young professionals and students in Dhaka, that small, deliberate act – muting a group chat, switching a phone to airplane mode for a weekend, deleting an app rather than merely logging out of it – has become something closer to a survival strategy than a lapse in manners.
Call it “going dark”: A quiet, occasionally guilty, occasionally triumphant retreat from the expectation that everyone should be reachable, always.
The pressure behind that retreat is not imagined. A recent study of 701 Bangladeshi university students found that nearly half – 47.8 per cent – experienced severe nomophobia, the fear of being without one’s phone, a condition significantly associated with poorer psychological well-being and worse insomnia.
A separate cross-sectional study of Bangladeshi youth found 68 per cent showed signs of smartphone addiction, with 74 per cent reporting real disruption to their daily functioning, and researchers linking the pattern to anxiety, depression, poor concentration, and academic decline. These numbers describe something more specific than simple overuse: A generation whose devices have become sources of near-constant low-grade dread as much as connection.
Much of that dread traces back to expectations rather than the technology itself. WhatsApp and Messenger have quietly dissolved the line between office hours and personal time for many Bangladeshi professionals, turning a “quick question” at 9pm into an implicit demand for an immediate reply. Among friend groups, the same platforms have turned ordinary friendship maintenance – the “doorbell friend” who could once simply drop by unannounced – into something requiring a running, ambient performance of availability: Seen receipts, typing indicators, and the low anxiety of a message left on read.
The broader movement now giving language to this instinct is digital minimalism, a term popularised by Georgetown University computer science professor Cal Newport, who has spent nearly two decades arguing for intentional, curated technology use rather than either constant connection or total rejection of it. The philosophy isn’t anti-technology so much as anti-default: Instead of accepting every notification, group chat, and platform as a fixed cost of modern life, digital minimalists deliberately choose which digital relationships earn a place in their attention, and mute or delete the rest.
“Digital ghosting” – deliberately going quiet on social platforms for a stretch of time, sometimes announced, more often not – has become one of the more visible tactics within that broader philosophy, particularly among people who describe their online presence as exhausting to maintain rather than energising.
Unlike the earlier, more punitive-sounding “digital detox” trend, which framed disconnection as discipline or punishment for overuse, going dark is increasingly framed by its practitioners as something closer to joy: A reclaimed weekend, a dinner where no one’s phone buzzes, a friendship allowed to exist in longer, slower intervals rather than a constant thread of small check-ins.
The evidence backs up at least part of the instinct. A widely cited 2019 study found that participants who had their smartphone use deliberately restricted for a week experienced measurably reduced anxiety and increased life satisfaction. Separate research into “fear of missing out,” or FOMO – the anxious pull to keep checking in case something important happens without you – has linked that specific anxiety to lower self-esteem, poorer emotional regulation and greater social media dependency, suggesting that the fear driving hyper-availability may be doing more harm than the availability itself ever prevents.
Even at the level of simple productivity, constant task-switching between apps, chats and notifications has been shown to reduce output by as much as 40 per cent compared with more sustained, undistracted focus.
What distinguishes today’s “going dark” from older ideas of simply being a bad correspondent is the deliberateness of it. The people practising it are not, by most accounts, withdrawing from friendship – many describe protecting a handful of relationships precisely by refusing to let a dozen weaker ones drain the same finite attention.
The “doorbell friend”, in this framing, doesn’t disappear; they simply get real time and real presence instead of a running feed of reactions and half-attentive replies. What gets sacrificed is the appearance of being everywhere at once – the curated responsiveness that many now describe less as connection and more as a performance of connection, maintained at the cost of the version of friendship it was supposed to represent.
None of this suggests Bangladesh’s young digital minimalists are rejecting their phones or their friendships. If anything, the movement reads as an attempt to rescue both from a mode of constant, shallow contact that research increasingly suggests is making people more anxious rather than more connected.
Going dark, in that light, isn’t a retreat from other people – it’s an attempt to be reachable on terms that don’t quietly cost the person doing the reaching their sleep, their focus, or their peace of mind. Whether that becomes a lasting cultural shift or simply a phase this generation passes through on the way to inventing the next always-on habit remains an open question. For now, the notification badge keeps climbing – and, increasingly, more people are choosing, on purpose, not to look.
