I’m Addicted To Emojis. Help?

I've long been a big fan of emojis. When I was in high school, my best friend and I would stay up way too late trying to get one another to guess movie titles or common phrases by sending coded emoji combinations back and forth on our flip phones. I'm also the kind of person who always widely circulates those horny emoji-based chain texts when I come across them — long live Merry Dickmas.

My use of emojis is even baked into the aesthetic of my phone's layout: the two pink hearts next to my partner's name in my contact list, the house next to my parents' landline. The folders I've organized my apps into on my home screen get emojis as well: Social media apps are grouped together with the woman raising hand, photo apps with the flashing camera, banking apps with the money bag. Emojis simply make looking at a screen more fun. 

All of this is exactly why I've been obsessed with using them since I first discovered the concept of emoticons on AIM way back in elementary school. Recently though, my dependence on these little symbols has become much more serious, like an addiction, even. Every time I react to a co-worker's Slack message with the plus sign — or, a personal favorite, the double exclamation point — I feel like I've just received a rush of dopamine.

It's even gotten to a point where I'm left frustrated when I have to use platforms that don't seem to prioritize emoji reactions. You mean to tell me I can't double-click that funny Gchat message from my sister and seamlessly respond with a skull in seconds? Unacceptable. Emojis — which were once just cute and fun for me — now deeply necessary. According to experts, there's a reason for that.

Christina Janzer, senior director of Research & Analytics at Slack acknowledges that emojis are appealing because they're fun and lighthearted, but that's not all they're good for. In fact, she says, "that's barely scratching the surface of what emojis provide, especially in a tool like Slack." According to Janzer, in trying to replicate in-person communication with a digital tool, a lot gets lost. "When you're in person, you're looking at somebody's facial expressions, you're hearing the intonation in their voice, you can see whether they're happy or sad. You can read between all of that," she says.