Instead of spending time with a friend, now you can send them a template text – a generic response explaining that you’re too busy. There are even templates for sexting

They call him Mr Buy-In. After Tessa Rowe, a recruitment worker from Bristol, went on an underwhelming second date with Aaron (not his real name) – they had been set up by friends – he walked her home and asked if she would like to meet up again. Rowe declined.

“He put his foot in my front door,” says Rowe, 33, laughing, “and said: ‘What’s wrong? I’m not getting the same buy-in as I did the first time around.’” Inevitably, Mr Buy-In became a legend in Rowe’s friendship group.

How have we got to the point where we describe our personal relationships in language more befitting a corporate boardroom? It is not enough to hang out with friends: we schedule our meet-ups with the precision of a world leader at Davos, and even less joie de vivre. I’m at capacity right now, we intone solemnly to someone asking if we fancy a drink. How about we touch base in a few weeks, when I have more bandwidth?

The most extreme example of how corporate jargon has infected our personal relationships is the emerging trend of friendship template texts. First seen in a now viral and much-maligned Twitter thread from the American writer and activist Melissa A Fabello, template texts are generic responses you can send to that friend in crisis you don’t want to talk to. “Hey!” reads Fabello’s suggested response to a friend asking for support. “I’m so glad you reached out. I’m actually at capacity / helping someone else who’s in crisis / dealing with some personal stuff right now, and I don’t think I can hold appropriate space for you.”

Predictably, Fabello’s response became a meme. But she is not alone in her championing of template texts. There are templates for warning your friend you have bad news, or sexting. (“I’ve been having some sexual thoughts about you I’d like to share over text if you’d enjoy that,” was one deathless suggestion.) What you think about these texts is almost beside the point – although I’m tempted to agree with the writer Shon Faye, who argues that template texts aren’t sociopathic because sociopaths tend at least to be charming. How did it come to this?

“It’s about self-optimisation,” explains Prof André Spicer of the Cass Business School, the co-author of Desperately Seeking Wellness, an exploration of the wellness industry. He situates template texts within the broader rise of wellness culture, and with it the drive towards a better, optimised self. “How can you become perfect in your relationships? By going with canned scripts, you come up with what you think is a perfect response to something.”

This fashionably optimised self also attends therapy regularly – therapy attendance rates rocketed in the late 90s and 00s – and is unabashed about applying its terminology to everyday life. By using pseudo-therapeutic language such as “holding space”, template text-writers signal that they are emotionally intelligent, savvy and respectful of other people’s boundaries. Ironically, such texts may have unintended negative effects.

To someone in crisis, being on the receiving end of a template text could feel devastating. “If someone had sent me that message, I would have felt completely rejected,” says 27-year-old Anwen Hayward, a student from Cardiff. She suffered four bereavements earlier this year, and there have been many moments where she has reached out for support. “Often a fumbling response to a friend in need is far better,” Spicer explains, “because humans don’t always know how to respond a lot of the time.”

There is also a performative element to template texts, which are usually shared online by right-thinking activists. “We look to social media and these canned messages to see what being a good friend looks like,” says Spicer. As such, they feed into the broader performance of online selfhood that Jia Tolentino wrote persuasively about in Trick Mirror. “The internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive … the main purpose of this communication is to make yourself look good.”

Template texts represent the convergence of two forces – the drive towards optimisation and corporate culture. “The boundaries between work and life have become blurred,” says Spicer. “We’re encouraged to think about growing our human capital and see our personal relationships as if they are an economic enterprise to be carefully managed.” Hence the liberal use of corporate and therapy buzzwords such as “capacity”, “connecting”, and “emotional labour” in template texts.

Emotional labour as a concept has been hugely distorted – when coined by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild in 1983, it referred to the onerous burden placed on service workers to appear happy at all times. In general, being a friend to someone is not emotional labour. If you think it is, you’re probably the one who is really hard work. “Twitter is a cesspool for this,” says Hayward. “One person misuses a term and it gets misused over and over again.” She chafes at the idea that friendship is a form of work. “Emotional labour isn’t having to text a friend. The term has been devalued. You could argue that every interaction is emotional labour because it expends work on your behalf. But that’s not what it is.”

Why do we view friendships as if they are businesses to be maintained? Because as work has swelled to impinge on every aspect of our lives, each hour is a tiny unit of productivity to be carefully allocated. “These texts are the product of the increasing neoliberalisation of our world, where market metrics have colonised every dimension of our lives,” explains Dr Catherine Rottenberg, an expert in neoliberalism at the University of Nottingham. “Human beings are remade as specks of capital so that our relationship to ourselves and others becomes one of capital appreciation. Our relationships are perceived as forms of capital that need to be invested wisely in order to enhance the self’s overall value.”

As our relationships with other people become transactional, dating is reconfigured as a business venture – hence Mr Buy-In. Capitalism has loosened the ties that once bound people to an unprecedented extent. Communities are ripped apart by gentrification; deregulation and the erosion of workplace rights mean that we work longer hours in insecure employment for lower pay. “Neoliberalism has created a careless reality,” Rottenberg says. As people become estranged from each other, we reach for template texts to instruct us how to be empathetic, understanding human beings. “Our world – digitally mediated, utterly consumed by capitalism – makes communication about morality very easy but makes actual moral living very hard,” writes Tolentino in Trick Mirror.

While it is easy to sneer at template messages, or view them as uncaring, we use scripts in our daily lives without even realising. “Much of everyday interaction is scripted anyway,” says Spicer. “These texts are an example of the informal scripts we learn over time becoming formalised and manufactured.” He emphasises that scripts can be helpful when people are in anxiety-provoking situations, and don’t know what to say.

“I was irritated when I saw people mocking scripts,” says 24-year-old Kal Walters, from Idaho. In addition to working with autistic people as a care worker, Walters is on the spectrum, and their brother is also autistic. “Scripts help me navigate social situations where other people would intuitively pick up cues from other people and know how to respond,” Walters says. “Whereas I have to rely on a cheat sheet.” For someone with autism, scripts are a helpful way to navigate the bewildering maze of social interaction. “I don’t understand why people think it’s uncaring to use a script,” Walters adds.

“For me, it shows that I do care, and I’m trying to accomodate someone else’s expectations and do the right thing.”