It's September, which means backpacks, first-day photos, and every publication in America running some version of "what our kids need to learn this year." I'd like to flip that. Here's what I think we need to unlearn: the culture of the ping.
Diagnosis: Ping Traumatic Stress Disorder
I'd like to formally submit a new term — to Merriam-Webster, to the DSM, to whoever's in charge of these things: Ping Traumatic Stress Disorder. Symptoms include a full-body flinch every time your phone lights up, a compulsion to check it immediately, and the sense that if you don't respond in 90 seconds, something's gone terribly wrong. It hasn't. Someone just texted you a meme.
As a neurodivergent person, I had to physically turn the pings off — they were giving me actual PTSD-adjacent panic. Somebody needs
to pay for this condition, and it's not going to be me. I'm blaming the cell phone companies. They built the Skinner box. I just live in it.
We have all become Pavlov's dog
Here's the thing nobody wants to admit: We've been conditioned, the same way Pavlov's dog was conditioned to salivate at a bell. Except our bell is a ping, and instead of drooling, we react — before we think, before we pause. A text from the ER and a text that says "lol I lost my other sock" arrive looking identical. Same buzz. Same jolt. Same "I must deal with this right now" panic. That's not a functioning nervous system. That's one trained, like a lab animal, to stop discriminating between an emergency and a missing sock.
Even Missouri agrees with me
If you need further proof we've collectively lost the plot, look at Missouri's hands-free driving law: no touching your phone, no looking at it, no acknowledging its existence while you're behind the wheel. The state had to legislate us out of compulsively interacting with a screen while driving 2 tons of moving metal. That's not a driving law. That's an intervention.
And bless Apple for finally giving us Focus mode, genuinely — but it arrived so late I still think somebody owes me a Prozac prescription. A wellness co-pay from Verizon? I'm open to ideas.
The triple-tap coworker
We all know this person. They email you. Four minutes later, Slack — same question. Four minutes after that, they're at your office door asking why you haven't responded. I have been alive for 8 minutes since your first message. I was breathing. Possibly using the restroom. God forbid, thinking.
That's ping culture wearing a lanyard — the belief that unanswered within a commercial break means unreceived, so it gets re-delivered through three escalating channels. Silence for 11 minutes always reads as "they're ignoring me," never "they're busy" or "they're a human, not a server."
What ping culture actually costs us
Ping culture hasn't just ruined a couple of shirts with spilled coffee — though it has. It makes me forget things. I've had to start telling people: Just ping me, just text me, because I cannot hold a thought without a notification to anchor it. I have an alarm to remember to eat. I have an alarm to remember to go to the bathroom — like some pull-up-wearing toddler who needs a reminder chime to use the potty. I need a machine to tell me I'm hungry, and another to tell me I have to pee.
We've become sharp with each other, too, because pings train us to treat human interaction like a task notification: something to dispatch, not sit with. Quick response isn't compassionate response. It just feels productive.
So, how do we reclaim our humanity?
I don't think the fix is throwing your phone in a lake, tempting as that sounds some days. I think it's smaller than that.
A framework to sort the pings before they sort you:
- Essential — do it now. Something's actually on fire;
- Important, not urgent — it can wait till end of day;
- An idea for someone else — genuinely great, just not yours to chase. Pass it along;
- An idea for your vision board — yours, worth steady steps over time, but it doesn't get to derail today.
Simple ways to give your brain space to process:
- Turn pings off on purpose, not by accident;
- Use Focus mode like a real tool, not a suggestion you feel guilty about;
- Give yourself one breath before firing off a reflexive reply;
- Let silence mean "busy," not "ignoring you";
- Remember the person behind the message is a person, not a task.
Ping culture taught an entire generation to react before they think. Unlearning it means relearning something almost embarrassingly basic: the pause, the please, the thank you — the space to actually consider something instead of the panic that blows up your headspace because someone just spam-texted you 20 memes in a row. Probably me, honestly. For the good of your mental health. You're welcome.
Somebody still owes me for the coffee stains, though.
Amber Weigand-Buckley is a Springfield native and founding editor of the multi-award winning Leading Hearts magazine. You can find her at shortyellowpencilRX.com.
This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: What to do when pings have us trained like Pavlov's dog | Opinion
