As a Zillennial, on the cusp of both Gen Z and Millennials, my generation(s) have been stereotyped by the older folks as being afraid of phone calls, preferring a text to a voice on the other end of the line. And for a while, I’d say, yeah, I fell into this place of preferring a text as a teenager or chatting online, in my moody, insecure teenagedom, but then the phone call became this novelty of a thing. Calling someone seemed so serious, I became apprehensive if my question or answer was “serious” enough to warrant a call.
I didn’t want to be a burden, which is such a strange upside-down world from childhood, when the phone was the only way to contact your friends. I remember in the days of late elementary school, email being another exciting tool to communicate, like letters, but now email has become an intrusive contact on my smartphone. And maybe, that’s because email felt like real mail, when you could only check it on your window of computer time on the shared family computer. There was a boundary between online and offline. My mind has been marinating on this since watching a Theresa Yea video called, Why the Internet Will Never Be Cool Again.
I’m currently stuck in an endless game of phone tag, which is quite common when I am talking regularly to one of my parents. With my dad, it was a long game of waiting for that perfect window of nothingness. His layover in a city he found boring, I’d keep him company as he complained about life. Entertaining him and supporting him in his time of boredom, because if he were home, he was on the go every single moment. If I needed him, he would usually call me back on a drive home with a small set window for his attention span or horrible service.
My mom, in a similar fashion, gets stuck in these loops going non-stop. Except she answers the phone in loud restaurants, in the car, or at events, just to tell me that she is not available. She will even talk to other people around her, making me wait, or will pass the phone to the people she is with, as if I want to say hi to them when I really just wanted to converse with her about something important.
There is nothing like being on the brink of a panic attack and having your mom pass you to an acquaintance to say hi instead of listening to your crisis. Especially when you called because you thought they were home and available, but really, your loved one is always on the go. Not emotionally available. I hate calling and being met with passive-aggressive pressure to stop talking and let her go, even though she chose to answer the phone and enter into conversation like she was available at first, only to break that illusion as soon as you answer “how you are doing”. Read the room, kid, but honestly, how can I? This is particularly confusing when my parents both let me know how they would prefer me to live closer so I would be more available, but would it matter?
The video call and the text have become two of the most intrusive manners of communication, because a text should be responded to promptly and a video call, in her mind is perfectly normal to answer in a public setting like a restaurant or car without letting me know before I speak, what I believe I am saying in private to a person who is available to talk, to be swiftly gotcha-ed by the fact that I am not alone, and my privacy is not respected. The video call is like a two-edged sword; it is nice to connect with friends and family over long distances, but it is also a tool that hinders connection. It drops in unannounced and forces conversations that should be private to be open to the room.
I crave the dedicated correspondence of my grandma’s era, when she moved to another town, which meant that calling her mom would be categorized as long distance, and so she and her mom wrote letters to each other every day. I haven’t had that kind of connection with my mom since she got remarried, and I miss that feeling of connection, of being heard. It’s something that carried through my Grandma and my Aunt Florence’s generation, my phone calls with them being so intentional and full of connection. It was a visit, a catch-up, and was treated with hard boundaries. The common thread here is the lack of a smartphone.
Phones were still seen as tools to converse, not mini-computers full of distractions. I find this intentionality coming back to conversations I have with my friends; there are boundaries and moments set aside to converse without distractions. We have planned phone calls or dedicated pauses to set aside other tasks to write longer messages, like letters, through messaging apps. It has improved our communication and respect for each other’s time, in a way that I wish I could have with my parents. I just want to connect and not be connected. I want to converse and not call. I want to correspond and not text.
It is all a pipe dream, because this is never going to happen, they are just too enamoured with technology and the endless possibilities of their boomer generation, and the financial leg up that their generation has to be on the go and do things nearly constantly. We live in two different worlds, and that makes me sad.
One Rabbit Riot 