If you’ve ever been in a family group chat, you’ve probably seen the same exact stuff everyone else has. Grandma sends glittery coffee-and-flowers “good morning” pics, someone’s dad replies with a thumbs-up to everything, and there’s always that one relative dropping links to the latest news like it’s their job. That’s just how it works, I don’t make the rules.
Usually, all you have to do is pop in with a message every now and then so people know you’re alive. But for one Redditor, that wasn’t exactly an option… because it wasn’t even his family.
He got accidentally added to a private WhatsApp group chat, realized he didn’t know a single person in it, and somehow didn’t leave. Instead, he watched their everyday updates for months while everyone carried on like he belonged there—until someone finally noticed. Read on to see how it all played out.
The man got accidentally added to a private WhatsApp group chat for a family he didn’t know
Image credits: Andrej Lišakov / Unsplash (not the actual photo)
Instead of leaving, he stayed for months and ended up getting emotionally attached
Image credits: Brett Jordan / Unsplash (not the actual photo)
Image credits: Keisha Riley Lemons / Envato (not the actual photo)
Image credits: PayneSlipsAgain
Group chats are everywhere, and turns out they can be a good thing
Image credits: Alicia Christin Gerald / Unsplash (not the actual photo)
Faith Hill, writing for The Atlantic in 2023, suggested we might be living in the Age of the Group Chat. And in 2026, it’s hard to disagree. These days, it feels like there’s a group chat for absolutely everything.
There’s the Paris girls trip croissant emoji heart emoji girl dancing emoji chat, the obligatory family chat named after your surname in plural plus a “funny” word, the boyzz™, and of course, the group chat dedicated to discussing the weird people from the other group chat. They’re endless. Every day, one unceremoniously dies after everyone stops replying, and then a new one appears and rises out of the ashes of the previous one like a phoenix.
In fact, one study found that on WhatsApp, less than 2 percent of participants had only one-on-one chats, meaning the vast majority were part of group conversations. Chaotic as that constant noise can seem, it may actually be doing something positive. Because, spoiler: staying connected is good for us.
Kate Mannell, a media studies research fellow at Deakin University, has looked into what group chats do to the way we communicate. She describes the steady background chatter as an “ambient presence”—something group chats tend to strengthen.
“Group chats extend out into a sense of ambient presence of your wider social connection,” she told Emily Draper at Ensemble. “You don’t need a long conversation on the phone or to write a letter, you can just keep in touch in small ways across the day.”
A similar idea comes up in the work of Annette Markham, a digital-culture researcher at Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She’s compared that “ambient presence” to echolocation—the way animals like bats and dolphins send out ongoing signals and use the echoes to understand what’s around them.
In a modern version of that, group chats can work like a constant call-and-response: you share, you react, you pick up little updates, and you get a sense of where you fit in your wider social web.
And honestly, that’s kind of wholesome, isn’t it? For instance, Mannell interviewed university students about their group chat habits and found “a lot of really beautiful stories about group chats being really important sites of ongoing support.”
She also found evidence that group chats can alleviate some of the stress or guilt associated with direct one-to-one messaging. “There’s less pressure to respond [than one-on-one] because you’re part of a group that’s being communicated with.”
In a way, it’s kind of like being at a party and suddenly realizing your social battery is dead, but you’re not ready to head out yet. So you step away for a minute and give yourself a little break. You grab a snack in the kitchen, or claim an empty corner of the sofa, and just sit there watching the room do its thing.
The best part is, the party doesn’t need you to keep running. Someone else will carry the conversation, and you can simply exist without having to say much or anything at all. Then, once you’ve recharged, you slide back in like nothing happened.
But as with everything, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing
Image credits: Kelsey Chance / Unsplash (not the actual photo)
The thing with real-life parties is that you can only be physically present at one. With group chats, though, you can have ten, twenty, or even more all living on your phone, each demanding your attention in its own way.
That’s where it starts to feel suffocating. Joseph Bayer, a communication professor at Ohio State University who studies mobile technologies, told The Atlantic that too many groupchats can create a “waterfall type of effect,” where messages keep flooding in and adding up. After a while, it starts to feel like you can’t catch up no matter how hard you try.
On top of that, Katharina Knop-Hülß, a mobile-media researcher at Hanover University in Germany, told The Atlantic that every group chat comes with a mix of personalities, communication styles, and unspoken expectations about how people “should” behave.
So even if you think it’s perfectly normal to go quiet for a bit, someone else might take it personally or read it as rude. People can have totally different ideas of what “enough” participation looks like in that small space, and that’s where tension starts to build.
And if someone calls you out for not meeting those expectations, it can get uncomfortable fast, especially with the whole group watching. Leaving isn’t always an easy option either, since many apps announce it with a big message like “X left the group.” So instead of exiting, people often just mute the chat… and then it becomes a thread you insistently avoid, which creates its own weird vibe.
“Grext anxiety is hard to resolve because it isn’t really just about the group-chat form or even mobile technology in general; it’s about the eternal tension between individual and collective identity, between being our own person and being accountable to others,” writes Hill. “Ultimately, most of us do want connection, even if it involves some obligations; we’ll take an avalanche of messages when we’re busy if it means we can reach out when we’re hurting.”
Hill’s advice is to let go of the group chats you don’t actually care about. You don’t have to hold onto them like Jack on a piece of wood in the frozen ocean—they’re not going to save your life.
Instead, put your energy into the ones that genuinely matter to you. And when you can, don’t forget to call people or see them in real life, too.
Readers admitted the whole situation was pretty hilarious
And some chimed in with similar stories, proving this happens more often than people think
