In the listless early weeks of January – my resolutions for self-improvement already gone to the dogs – I was asked to conduct an experiment that those in my life who are over 40 deemed “lovely”, and everyone else regarded with unbridled horror: I was asked to spend a week picking up the phone and calling people rather than texting.
What a cakewalk, you say. Not quite, say those aged 18 to 34 – 61% of whom prefer a text to a call, and 23% of whom never bother answering, according to a Uswitch survey last year. Such is the pervasiveness of phone call anxiety that a college in Nottingham recently launched coaching sessions for teenagers with “telephobia”, and a 2024 survey of 2,000 UK office workers found that more than 40% of them had avoided answering a work call in the previous 12 months because of anxiety.
At 27, I am an OAP of generation Z, meaning there are certain things I don’t understand – why does everyone hate going to the pub? – and others that I innately do: namely, that phone calls are an outmoded, laboured form of communication. (Even my parents, who are in their mid-60s, and still struggle to conduct a videocall without providing an impromptu tour of their nostrils, have ditched their landline.)
“The reality is we’ve made better ways of communicating than having live telephone conversations,” says Duncan Brumby, a professor of human-computer interaction at University College London, who researches the impact of call notifications on smartphone users. Though much is made of young people’s ineptitude when it comes to picking up the phone, Brumby reckons we’ve just fallen out of practice, and prefer the convenience of asynchronous chatter.
“I think what we’re doing is picking up an associative pattern. It’s almost like that classic conditioning experiment, where the bell is rung before the food arrives and the dog starts salivating,” he says. “It’s the same thing when we hear our phone ringing, and it signifies to us that there’s probably something bad coming down the line.” (This is borne out by the Uswitch survey, which found that 56% of 18- to 34-year-olds assume a spontaneous call means bad news.)
There is also the fact that calls are now largely the reserve of scammers and telemarketers: in 2024 just under half of UK landline users (48%) said they’d received a suspicious call in the last three months – although this is down from 56% in 2021.
Then there are the endless opportunities for regret that the real-time phone call presents – which, thanks to existence of Facebook memories, are already plentiful. “One thing to point out with phone calls is that, if you make a mistake, it’s out there, whereas with texting, you can censor yourself: you can revise, you can decide not to reply or you can delete the message,” says Nelson Roque, an assistant professor of human development and family studies at Pennsylvania State University. “I think the device serves as a buffer.” Roque says that our reliance on text-based communication, coupled with the relentless self-promotion cycle of social media, has made us experts in self-editing – and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. “Having eyes always on you is perhaps encouraging us to play it more safe.”
Does that mean I’ll burn through my relationships for lack of a backspace button? Maybe. Wish me luck.
Monday
The opportunity to embark on my new life as a caller presents itself early in the day. My boyfriend texts to ask if I have plans for Friday. I ring him mid-morning, but he doesn’t answer. I could be dying and my next of kin isn’t answering the phone. I could die, I think, and then I’d be recused from this experiment. He calls me back after half an hour, but I miss it and return his call 30 minutes later. The game of telephone tag labours on for most of the afternoon. I try to let him know that I’m busy getting my eyebrows threaded (this, too, is something new I am trying). Naturally, I make this call out of earshot of my colleagues because I would rather have my whole body threaded than make a personal call at my desk.
“I can see you turning out to be a great caller,” he says when he eventually answers – a compliment that, I’m convinced, only the intimacy of talking on the phone could encourage. Already my relationships are deepening, I think. Texting be damned. Emboldened by his praise, I make a call that I have been avoiding for the best part of six months: booking a routine smear test. I regret it as soon as the receptionist’s voice cuts through the incongruously peppy waiting music. She suggests I come in on Saturday.
“Maybe that’s too soon?” I ask.
“It’s never too soon,” she chides. Suitably chastened, I bury my phone at the bottom of my bag and try not to look at it for the rest of the day.
Tuesday
I have been well primed for the awkwardness that will ensue from calling people I have never spoken to on the phone. I am less well prepared for what happens when they don’t answer. Twice. Trying to push myself further than yesterday, I call an old colleague I haven’t texted for the best part of six months. Like dating, we’re in that tentative stage of friendship wherein it’s probably not advisable to unleash all the worst parts of your personality just yet. I leave a bumbling message, and immediately wish for the self-editing ability that Roque talked about. As the day progresses, all of the usual thoughts flood my anxious brain: she never saved my number, she thinks I’m unhinged, she’s going to endorse me for being a freak on LinkedIn.
Not one to be cowed, I call an old colleague at the same company. Again, no answer. Well, that’s that bridge torched, I think.
I try a few more friends – surely they’ll pick up. Not a single one. “I’m at work,” one texts me sternly. (Since when did this generation start taking their careers seriously?) I call Brumby. “Much of life’s more pleasant interactions we now do asynchronously because it’s easier,” he says. “This allows us to reach our friends, and it doesn’t rely on them being available at the same time.” I try to take comfort in this, though really I spend the afternoon worrying that nobody would attend my funeral.
As the day progresses I feel increasingly despondent. Until, at last, a bright spark in a dull day: my best childhood friend texts to tell me that she thinks therapy isn’t working for her because she’s too funny. She is, in fairness, the funniest person I know, and though she only lives in Ireland, while I’m London, it feels like the other side of the world. I call her back immediately. “I thought you were dying or something when I saw you calling,” she says. We talk for an hour. “Really,” we both agree, “it’s crazy that we don’t do this more.”
Wednesday
Ah, the group chat: my nemesis, my friend. A good one is the best source of gossip in the world; a bad one (that is, one with more than eight people that you were added to non-consensually) is like having someone screaming, incessantly, through your letterbox. By Wednesday, tortured by the notifications in one of two chats I take an active role in, I’m itching to throw in my two cents. I do one of those cacophonous group voice calls that makes everyone sound as if they’re dialling in from a cave.
“How do you all feel about phone calls, then?” I ask once the initial pleasantries are out of the way.
One friend tells me that when she worked as a temp secretary for a luxury lingerie company with a “no randos ringing up” policy, she took her role as gatekeeper so seriously that she spent the best part of a day arguing with an internal head of department about whether she was permitted to patch them through to their own colleague. Another says that she hates answering the communal office phone so much that she’s managed to get away with doing it just twice in the half-year she’s been in the job by employing the classic tactic of waiting for someone else to pick it up before springing into action, then feigning disappointment that she didn’t get there first. Sublime.
Thursday
On Thursday I call a friend who has a four-month-old baby and who, as a result, I didn’t expect to hear from until at least 2030. In the background I can hear bike bells and rumbling traffic as he takes a break from his desk.
“Sorry if this is all garbled,” he says, perfectly lucid for someone who has been sleeping in 45-minute bursts for the last few months.
We talk for half an hour – about the baby, about the lost art of the landline call (he’s 37), and whether or not it’s acceptable to go on a work trip when the baby is still so small. (Yes, we conclude, provided you don’t boast to your partner about your restedness upon return.) Our conversation is much more expansive than the rushed, new-parent prose that would be contained in a few texts volleyed back and forth.
“I’ll see you in a few years,” I sign off.
“Well … we’ll see,” he says.
Friday
Scratching around for someone new to call on Friday – and praying I don’t have to resort to booking another invasive medical appointment – I get a message from an old flatmate who I haven’t texted in more than a year, and who I haven’t seen in person since before the pandemic. It’s fate, I think, and fire up the phone.
Her WhatsApp picture is of her in a wedding dress. She’s doing a bit of freelance bridal modelling? Sort of. In the time since we’ve spoken, she’s got married, her dad has died and she’s preparing to move cities – all of this coming tumbling out within the first 10 minutes of our chat. I’m surprised by how quickly the intimacy comes flooding back – how, despite how much time has passed, it feels like we’re just continuing the conversation from where we left off in our grubby student flat.
“Sometimes it’s easy to think that you just go out and make friends, but actually you need to maintain those friendships over time and nurture those social connections,” says Prof Andrea Wigfield, the director of the Centre for Loneliness Studies at Sheffield Hallam University when I call her later in the day. So should I just be scattergun-calling everyone in my address book? Not exactly: loneliness isn’t alleviated simply by having a lot of people around, she assures me (thank God, because it only took me until Friday to run out of people to call). “It’s about the quality and meaningfulness of those relationships.”
Saturday
As an introvert, I’m used to the inevitable crash that accompanies a full week of socialising. But rather than spending Saturday morning feeling as if my edges have been blunted, vowing never again to speak to a single soul, I’m strangely energised.
I call my friend David, initially to cancel plans (I didn’t say I’m fully reformed), but then we chat about our respective weeks. I haven’t hated it as much as I thought I would, I admit.
“Surely this phone call thing is more fuel for you to just not leave the house – that is, less than you already do,” he says.
The beauty of the phone call is that you can hang up whenever you like. Sorry, my connection dropped, I’ll say if he calls back.
Sunday
I do not want to speak to a single soul – not the Tesco delivery man, not my partner, not the industrious scammer who keeps calling to offer me a fully remote job that pays £150k. But, alas, it is social maintenance day, and I must make all of the calls I’ve been dodging for the past week. I call my mum, I call my newly engaged brother, who I have probably spoken to on the phone a grand total of 10 times in my life.
“I was doing this thing where I had to call loads of people for a week,” I tell my mum.
“You never called me,” she says.
“Maybe I will more in future,” I say – and for a minute I think I actually believe it.
It’s all over
What did I learn from my week as a caller? That texting is no match for face-to-face interaction – but chatting on the phone is a good halfway house. That there is something nice about conducting your most pedestrian interactions via phone call, so that if you unexpectedly disappear and the police mine your texts for clues, they won’t know how boring you truly were. That “do not disturb” mode is a blessing from the smartphone gods. And that the people you really need will always pick up the phone – provided you give them two days’ notice.
