maybe we should all call our friends more
the forgotten joy of phone calls
Hello reflecters, how have you been? It simultaneously feels like five minutes ago and five years ago I sent out my last letter with lots of links to the articles, books and other things I was enjoying in March. Also, a quick hello to the new reflectors who have joined us recently! I’m so happy to have you here! <3
I’ve been thinking a lot about how we use our phones and the internet in general recently and this idea about phone calls kept popping up, so I grabbed my notebook and started writing. I hope some of you can relate to these thoughts I’ve been having and maybe even think about calling up a friend soon… And if any of my friends are reading this right now, yes, expect a random call from me soon heheh.
Maybe we should all call our friends more.
Perhaps the internet and social media and endless feeds have gone too far and we should retreat to the time when house phones were an essential part of the home and stop there. Our feeds used to have a finish line, “You’re all caught up!” it would say and then we’d close the apps and find something else to do. We have scrolled too far and found ourselves in an unknown place, somewhere where climbing back up doesn’t seem to be an option anymore. You can keep digging or hold out hope that one day you may see the light again. Or find your own way to climb out.
Happy people talk on the phone a lot. The Washington Post says it’s better for the soul. They meet up in person, only using messages to share articles and events and books and jumpers they’re thinking of purchasing. Their relationships don't exist purely online or in a series of sentences. They couldn't imagine messaging someone so often that they’d never met face to face. They couldn't even imagine messaging someone so much in the first place. The frustration of being unable to articulate ourselves and convey emotions through the screen is no longer something we worry about. It has vanished from our laundry list of “improvements”. The earth has done the impossible and has begun to rotate in the opposite direction.
I second guess whether my friends would want to hear from me on the phone, I cower at the “awkward” silences as conversations naturally come to an end. Fear has become a staple in our contemporary diets, consumed as frequently as the air we breathe, calorie-dense.
I don’t think often about whether we’ll return to the times of corded phones and long nights on MSN. I think about the people who scramble at apps like ‘minimalist phone’ or tuck the more colourful apps away in folders on the third or fourth page of their home screens; I think of myself. I know we tend not to stop, turn around and walk the other way but instead use our peripherals and carry on. We won’t return to corded telephones but perhaps
We’ll just call our friends more.
We’ll see the errors of our ways sooner rather than later. And in the future, we’ll be brave enough not to succumb to the friends of our children and remember that we are the adults, and we can say no to our children when they beg for an Instagram account or a TikTok account or a smartphone because we have been there before. Because we understand firsthand the effects of filters and algorithms, we’ve read the countless articles and watched the countless YouTube videos on fruitful and peaceful lives without social media and that’s all we want for ourselves and the bare minimum for our children. We will free their minds from the sheer amount of “edutainment” no mind at nine, thirteen or fifteen should have to consume.
Is it asking too much to return to the transitional phase? When everyone wasn’t expected to have an email address let alone five or six? When someone says community and you don't immediately shoehorn “online” in front of it or think of a huddle of profile pictures and usernames but your neighbours and the people you see regularly at the farmer’s market or the library or the allotment or the park.
I think phone calls can reduce the amount of loneliness in the world. I think phone calls can relieve the accumulated stress we have as a result of capitalist structures. I think phone calls can allow the Earth to rotate in the right direction again.
The times when you’d spend hours on the house phone chatting with your friends seem like simpler, happier times. It’s when that life feels completely different to the one you’re living right now, like something you read in a book once or a faded memory of a dream you once had. It’s like yearning for a time you weren’t born in. But the wound is much deeper when you realise it’s your brain that has stored the memories of said simpler, happier times.
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