It's not just millennials: the rise of the midlife phone-phobe

I may have some grey hairs and eye liner older than Ariana Grande, but in one respect I am youthful, vital, and absolutely au courant. Along with those decades younger than me, I will do anything to avoid speaking on the phone. 

The new Social Media, Social Life study of teens’ online life reveals they increasingly prefer texting to talking face to face. In 2012 the same survey showed 49 per cent preferred real life conversation to texting; that figure has now dropped to 32 per cent.

Full disclosure: when I say I’ll do anything to avoid the phone, that’s not strictly true. I am never more than a metre away from it. I use it to read emails, order cabs, check my bank account, book restaurants, and send texts, tweets and WhatsApp messages.

I use it to listen to podcasts and audiobooks while I’m walking my dogs, to read the paper when I am on the bus, and to do some slow breathe-in-breathe-out to a meditation app if I wake up with my heart racing in the middle of the night. I can count on one hand how often I use it to make and take calls in a week. 

While 76 per cent of us own smart phones, 25 per cent of us don’t use them to make calls. The amount of time a typical smartphone user spends on non-voice activities has almost trebled since 2012, to 90 minutes a day.

And while we’re all weeping for humanity, I would like to point out that 33 per cent of the kids in the Social Media study said they wished their parents would spend less time on their devices, too, so it’s absolutely not just a youth thing (I see you grandma, sharing that cat video on Facebook).

It’s become easier and easier to avoid talking to people, and for those interactions to become just something else to organise, something else to control. Both at work and at home, I am regularly involved in lengthy email chains to arrange suitable times for phone calls. Occasionally someone will just jump in and ring and it feels like a revolutionary act. Then there are those who gleefully insist on always calling, rather in the manner of the appalling wretches who proudly announce themselves to be the kind of people who call a spade a spade.

The only people I cheerfully speak to on the phone are my mother and my best friend (I would say my husband, but our calls are always of the table’s-booked-for-eight-bye-click variety and that’s absolutely fine by me). I recently read a quiz on how to tell if you’re an introvert and one of the questions was: if, when a phone rings in a room, do you react as though a gun has gone off? Yes, that’s me. Annie Get Your i-Phone.

But I’ve not always been like this. I was that teen who spent half the evening talking on the phone to the very same girls I’d spent all day with at school, as my dad patrolled the draughty hallway, tapping his wristwatch with increasing irritation.

The Social Media study indicated the reason teens prefer text to talk is that they can control the pace of their interactions, and can also use messaging to mask their own shyness or social awkwardness. I think many of us can relate to that. When I dial a number, I can’t shake the feeling that I might be interrupting something far more important. Texting doesn’t induce that kind of anxiety as the recipient can choose to reply when they want. Or if they want.

I know I am not alone. Mention your phone phobia in almost any social setting, and you will instantly have a coterie of new friends, all relieved that it’s not just them (on the fast-friends front, not phoning is the new smoking). Just this week, I met a very high powered lawyer who has turned off the voicemail facility on her phone and will only take or make calls at certain times of day. I hardly know anyone with a landline anymore. 

Part of my own anxiety comes from my conviction that phones conspire against me: they break, cut themselves off, and develop strange whirrs and clicks. This very morning when my editor called to ask me to write this piece, I was hollering “hello hello HELLO” into a void before I realised I had the headphones plugged in but had failed to attach them to my actual ears.

And let’s not even talk about the time I attempted to interview a world-famous chef on the phone. After a million emails to ascertain availability and time zones, barely had I pressed record when a brass band struck up in the square outside the window. 

So, as we’re friends, how about we come to some kind of agreement? Don’t call me and I won’t call you.