The answer almost everyone gives, to a question almost nobody meant literally. It ends the conversation it was supposed to start.
Someone asks how you have been. You look at the message for a while. You have been fine, mostly, apart from the thing at work and the thing with your sister and the fortnight where you did not leave the house much. None of that is a text.
So you type good! busy but good, and the conversation is now over.
"How have you been?" is a request for a summary. Not of today, of the whole span since you last spoke. If that is four months, the honest answer is an essay with an editorial decision in it: what counts, what is too heavy, what makes you sound like you are complaining.
That is real work, and it arrives without warning in a friendly package. Most people do the reasonable thing and refuse the assignment. "Good, busy" is not evasion. It is the only answer that fits in the space provided.
The asker then has nothing to respond to, because there is nothing in "good, busy" to catch hold of. Two people who genuinely wanted to talk have produced a dead thread in two messages.
A question is easy when the answer already exists. Not when it is small, when it is specific enough that the other person does not have to decide what you meant.
Compare:
how have you been?
did the thing with the landlord ever get sorted
The second is barely longer. But it names a time, a topic and a scope, and the answer is already in the other person's head. They do not have to select or summarise. They just say it.
If you want the headline:
what's the big thing in your life right now
what's taking up most of your head this month
If you want the ordinary detail, which is usually the good stuff:
what did you do on Sunday
what's the last thing that annoyed you
are you still doing the run club or did that quietly die
If you have been out of touch a long time and genuinely do not know:
right, assume I know nothing. what's changed since March
The last one works because it says the quiet part. It admits the gap, sets the scope, and hands over the job of choosing without pretending you already know.
The span the question covers grows with the silence, so the question gets harder exactly when the friendship is most fragile. Four months in, "how have you been" is a request for a novel, and the person who cannot face writing it sends "good, busy" and feels slightly worse about the whole thing.
There is a piece about that gap specifically: what to text a friend after months of not talking.
You are allowed to answer a different question. Nobody asking "how have you been" wants the summary. They want to be talking to you.
honestly too much to summarise. ask me something specific
mixed. the work bit is bad, the rest is fine. how are you
Both of those hand back something to grip. Which is all the original question was trying to do, before it asked for more than anyone could carry.
The question is not the problem. The scope is. Ask about a Tuesday instead of a year and most people will tell you far more than they meant to.