‘All good for tonight?’: The text messages we’re all guilty of - and what to do about it

The slow demise of Australian ‘mate-ship’ is upon us, with as many as 40 per cent of Aussies reporting moments of loneliness in a given week.

A crisis of community has been quietly brewing in our backyard, with increasingly short windows of time allocated for connection. Aussie friendships have officially succumbed to the ‘catch-up trap’ – and there’s a clear culprit driving this unwelcome shift.

Social ‘scheduling’

It’s called social scheduling − and we’re all guilty of it.

Rather than living our lives alongside our friends, we instead find ourselves assigning them set timeslots; delivering life updates over overpriced flat whites and chicken parma pub feeds.

Never making new memories – just keeping each other in the loop.

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Seemingly gone are the days of the spontaneous hangout, and as it turns out, there’s a cultural element that may have had a hand in killing it.

As most epiphanies do, it all began with three friends, a pub and a candid conversation.

In a now-viral reel posted by Aussie creator Aadhya Wije, she and her mates were shown discussing the possible cause behind the “appointment friendship” epidemic.

“It’s not that my friends don’t love me, it’s that we’re slaves to time,” Wije stated.

“In Sri Lanka, I had this mind-blowing experience where I messaged our group chat and said ‘hey, Park Street tonight?’” She recalled.

“There are eight people in our group chat – seven people rocked up! When does that ever happen in any of my group chats here?”

It was then that the trio collectively identified a larger element at play than the individual. Enter: ‘Monochronic culture.’

A concept in social anthropology coined by Edward T Hall, ‘Monochronic’ and ‘Polychronic’ are terms used to describe how different cultures perceive, value and manage their time.

Polychronic societies – the likes of Italy, France or South Asia – treat time as fluid, cyclical and relationship-centric. In these cultures, people often handle multiple tasks simultaneously and prioritise interpersonal connections over strict schedules or deadlines.

Monochronic regions such as the United States or Australia, meanwhile, view time as a linear, tangible resource to be strictly managed. In these cultures, we tend to focus on a one-task-at-a-time approach, with particular emphasis on schedules, deadlines and punctuality.

The cost of being ‘time-poor’

The Real Relationships Report 2025 found one in two Australians have shrinking friendship circles, while nearly one in three currently feel socially isolated.

University of Newcastle Sociologist Dr. Julia Cook cited Aussies’ increasingly monochronic, time-poor approach as a key contributor to this.

“Our experience of time and our subjective view of time is accelerating,” Cook said. “Time is moving increasingly quickly. We’re trying to cram an increasing number of things into it.”

She added that in the grand scheme of things, friendships often rank somewhere below family and work on our list of day-to-day priorities.

“That’s an outcome of being so time poor in many ways – we squeeze in a quick coffee, or catch up after going to the gym.”

It’s here where Australia’s stereotypically easy-going, slow-living facade begins to crumble.

Contrary to the idea that we’re all “rather laid back,” Cook pointed out that we tend to work relatively long hours compared to similar OECD countries.

According to OECD Labour Data, the average Australian worker clocks around 1630 hours per year, placing us in the middle-to-high end of these rankings – above countries such as the UK, Germany and Japan.

It happens to all of us...

Admittedly, even I – who have spent only eight months in Australia thus far – am not entirely immune to its particular brand of hustle culture, and have seen a notable shift in my own approach to friendships since.

There I sat, adding the finishing touches to this very article, as my phone buzzed: “All good for tonight?”

And as it happened, no – I was not all good for tonight. Pub plans I’d locked in two days prior had entirely slipped my mind.

And therein lies the problem.

As I sheepishly scrambled to reschedule said plans, the irony of my circumstances was certainly not lost on me.

Reclaiming connection

While easier said than done, breaking the Monochronic mould requires an intentional mindset shift, and an attempt to “fit each other into the rhythms of our daily lives” once more.

Cook cited a return to so-called ‘third spaces’ – regular haunts outside of home and work – as supplementary to this, but admitted it was made more difficult by the “double-edged sword” that is digital connection.

Australian legislation surrounding the “right to disconnect,” she said, was a step in the right direction for reframing time allocation – and escaping the indefinite cycle of the catch-up trap.

Introduced in 2024, the legislation in question allowed eligible employees to refuse after-hours contact from employers – within reason.

This protection aimed to prevent mounting workloads and improve work-life balance; an initiative that Cook believes may be key to shifting our approach to friendships.

“There’s space for a shift around the kind of culture of always being on, always being available,” she said.

“[The legislation] helps us to finish work and go and spend time with our friends without the possibility of being interrupted.”

Continued progress in this area, she said, would allow for a return to the simpler, organic hangouts that we build our lives around.

To do groceries together, to pivot a mate’s flat-pack wardrobe up their sharehouse staircase; it’s from those small, in-between moments that more profound bonds are forged.

But by treating time as a scarce commodity, we strip friendship of its organic nature.

“That contributes to having fewer opportunities to live the substance of our lives together... with the everyday rhythms of what we’re doing.”

When all is said and done, we must work to incorporate our inner circles into the messy, unfiltered, middle sections of our lives – rather than boxing them into the formal debrief at the end.