Why Young People Hate Phone Calls

tl;dr: Having information in text means:

• You can edit & refine it before sharing
• It provides a clear record of what was said instead of relying on human memory
• The information sent is verbatim and unchanged by human & technological filters

I’m what folk call a Zillennial, which means I’m not quite a Millennial and not quite Gen Z. But it gives me a unique position where I can talk on behalf of the ‘young people’ plaguing your workplace.

So I’m going about my day, neck deep in a task which demands continued concentration – concentration that’s broken when a little alarm on the desk starts screeching out, letting me know that someone in the world finally wants me. Regardless of how important the current task is, the pressure put on me to answer calls ASAP means I have to throw everything away to pick up the phone.

I have a few seconds to check who’s calling, but despite advanced in Caller ID systems they’re useless, leaving me with no idea who’s on the other side. It could be a colleague, a boss, some random member of the public with an overinflated idea of what the company does, or a robot. Not even a cool robot.

Usually it’s a colleague, and when the meandering pleasantries are over and done with we get to what this call is all about: information.

For something immediately ‘actionable’ a phone call is fine, but more often than not I’m recited the entirety of War and Peace with the expectation I’ll memorise every line. Unfortunately I don’t have a tape recorder installed in my brain so I have to take notes. But writing takes time, so I have to mentally compress everything so I ca- Christ they’ve managed to change the topic twice now and I’ve only written a single line.

As I scribble away, what little mental energy I have left is focused on mumbling mmh at every moment of silence, just so they know I’m still here. Meanwhile my attention is stretched thin in a mental triathlon, jumping between listening, compressing, writing, and replying. I don’t think I’m actually paying attention to what’s being said, assuming I can actually hear them.

You see (or hear), parsing words over the phone is a bloody nightmare. Despite over a century of technological advancements, phone calls still sound terrible. Cheap microphones and speakers lead to the most tinny voices crackling out from the other end, exacerbated by the spottiest network signals known to man. Understanding such digitised screeches might just be manageable if you work in a quiet office, but as if I’d ever have that luxury.

Unable to hear what they say, I ask them to repeat it. And again. And again. Asking another time is social suicide, so I take a deep breath and pretend I fully understand everything that’s been asked of me. It’s all a little overwhelming and to avoid further awkwardness I end the call as fast as possible.

Oh yeah, you bet I’m allowing social embarrassment to completely trump reason.

When the call is over, what I’m left with is a bastardised copy of the original information – a scrap of paper filled with arcane scribbles resembling the Zodiac letters. It’s a bloody miracle if I can figure out what I’ve wrote down, let alone what was asked of me. Inevitably I take a deep breath, ringing them up again to clarify everything. It’s horribly inefficient.

All of this could’ve been avoided if they just sent me an email instead.

… Oh, and what was I doing before the phone rang?

The issue with phone calls is that what you say goes through multiple technological and human filters to the point where it’s easy for the other person to end up with an incorrect, incomplete, or impermanent record of what was said. All of this could be avoided if information was sent over an email instead.

Having that written record of what you said lets folk view it as intended and refer back to it later. And unlike the sporadic nature of talking, the act of writing/typing gives you time to edit and refine what you want to say clearly before you send it, and also allows you to format it in ways to make it clearer (be it using bold/italic text, lists, etc).

But why do my younger coworkers/relatives/friends/etc hate making phone calls as well? Why do they do everything in their power to not call their coworkers/doctor/bank/[whoever young people are supposed to call]? It’s much the same:

• Unlike talking face to face, talking over the phone removes all visual social cues making it more difficult for some people to navigate conversations.
• You remove doubt and anxiety when you’re not limited to the words that come out of your mouth in the moment. Being able to refine exactly what you want to say makes for a more comfortable experience.
• You don’t have to put everything else aside for a long period of time. Unlike waiting for a phone call or being put on hold (or worse: stuck in an automated phone menu), you can focus on a myriad of other tasks while you wait for an email.
• Written communication provides a direct record of what’s been said, allowing us to accurately look back on it in the future.
• Not everything is urgent. There are many things people could email about and wait for, but often the chance to do so doesn’t exist.

“But what about online voice chats and video calls?” you might ask. That’s slightly different.

Often the frequency range of online calls is much larger than that of a usual phone call, allowing for voices to come through clearer; furthermore microphones and earphones you can connect to a computer sound miles better than the tiny ones found in phones – and being able to change the volume of each device is a godsend. And for video calls, being able to see the other person and their visual cues can make a massive difference.

On top of that every online voice chat program includes a way to contact someone through text, allowing you to check if they available for a call before organising one. It’s polite, and your brain notices how polite it is when given the option – unfortunately it’s not an option with phone calls. Maybe those young ‘uns are onto something.

At the end of the day we’ve grown up in a world with more ways to communicate, and we’ve simply settled with different means than generations before, filled with our own customs and norms. We’ve settled into ways we believe are more efficient and less stressful to navigate through, and I don’t see us changing our minds in the future.

It’s not that we hate talking, far from it. It’s that we’re living in a world which refuses to catch up.