Just call them. Yes, now.
Social media incentivizes shallow connections over deep listening and real conversation. Make friendship mean something again with a phone call — unscheduled or not.
One of the most unexpectedly enjoyable things about not having social media accounts, I’ve found, is that virtually nobody I know is surprised when I call them out of the blue.
I do this quite often, especially with my international friends, who I’m unlikely to grab a coffee with or run into at the El Corte Inglés here in Lisbon. I’ll have a glance at the time in their local slice of the planet, and if it’s not an outrageous hour of the day or night, I pick up the phone and I call them.
This is a radical notion these days, I’m well aware. For many of us, perhaps especially those of the Gen Z variety, an unexpected live phone call in 2025 is about as welcome as being groped on public transportation.
We’ve all become acculturated to the isolated social media status update, What’s on your mind?, and the luxury of responding when and if and how it is convenient to us, as our packed schedules allow (those crazy schedules, you wouldn’t believe how busy I am). We’ve been conditioned to prefer the asynchronous shell of isolation afforded by SMS and messaging apps in stuttering fragmented threads and group chats that have no beginning and no end, instead unreeling as bottomless scrolls of emojis and continuous, autocorrected streams of consciousness, skimming along the thin surface of thought and whatever’s happening on our second and third screens as we type. Or, in the rare instances a text thread has our full attention, we agonize for long minutes between responses over exactly what to say and how to articulate it perfectly, knowing it will be preserved in perpetuity, revisitable at any time with the flick of a finger. Instead of spontaneity and improvisation and the visceral satisfaction of a conversation that alternately glides and staggers forward like a beautiful Chaplinesque, proceeding through efflorescent bursts of plosives, dipthongs and glottal stops, we get an eggplant emoji.
For most of us, texting and social media posts have so fully taken over communications between friends that an unscheduled phone call is automatically taken to mean urgent, disastrous news. Why else would they be calling? Phone calls, in this formulation, are only for Very Important Information — car accidents, engagements, lawsuits, pregnancies, deaths. It’s no accident that in the new season of Mike White’s zeitgeist-spooning HBO series The White Lotus, the swaggering American financier Timothy Ratliff is constantly flouting the resort’s no-phone policy to take or avoid phone calls, not to glower over text messages. A vibrating phone? The FBI, obvs.
For young people, especially, phone calls are widely seen not only as inconvenient but rude, because they ask so much of the recipient, who must cease or at least attempt to hide their furious multitasking for a precious few minutes.
Psychologist and author Sherry Turkle has compared the constant back-and-forth of text messaging and quickie posts on social media to “sips” of online connection that do little to quench the need we all have for real conversation and deeper, authentic relationships.
A phone call, on the other hand, requires a fullness of immersion in what’s being said, and how it’s being said, and what’s not being said, and how it’s not being said, and, no less, what’s happening in the moments when someone is not saying anything. When I’m on a call with my friends, I hear concern and tenderness and irony and incredulity and fear and jubilation and nervous laughter and unease, all ferociously and electrically alive, in ways that no emoji or LOL can come close to capturing. The pauses and hesitations in these conversations cannot simply be reduced to the “someone’s typing” ellipsis (a thing which, curiously, seems to have no actual name, though it is a source of profound and widespread anxiety). In a real conversation, those verbal elisions are thick with meaning for both of us — often of greater significance than what is being spoken out loud. The interstices in text exchanges are a source of disquiet; in real conversation, they’re like the harmonics in the alien signal in Contact: packed with meaning vastly beyond what we initially apprehend.
The friends I call do not always answer. But I know they have seen that I called, and that I can expect a callback, similarly unscheduled, at some point in the following day or so. When they do return my call, I too may or may not be able, or be inclined, to take it. We will play this game, missed call notifications lingering like breadcrumbs at increasingly shorter intervals, until random and unknown schedules align and someone picks up, delighted to have at last collapsed the wave function into a single unified quantum state.
I have ongoing text threads with all of these people as well, of course; I’m not a complete barbarian. And after all, GIFs and memes and even emojis carry their own elegant harmonics, a symbology that exists in the space between friends and inside jokes and shared experiences that mere language cannot replicate.
And yet. None of it matters without actual conversations of the traditional earball-to-earball variety. Friendship for me must be more than the occasional supercilious back and forth on the news of the day. Simply knowing what someone is up to — what their status is at a given hour of a given day — is emphatically not the point. Leonardo raising a toast as Gatsby is no substitute for telling someone, in your own words, that they absolutely crushed it. Selecting the crying face emoji will never provide the emotional release of sobbing into someone’s ear for long minutes while they give you the space, wordlessly, to do so.
So I call them, and we listen to each other. Rarely do we elect for video; we all have enough of that in our professional lives, and video, ironically, can carry too much information, distracting from what’s being said, and making an encounter between friends feel like just another work meeting. How odd, I sometimes think, that I return again and again to a form of communication that is neither very old nor very new, but exists in a strange liminal space between the two.
Naturally, sometimes these conversations have no more depth than what could have been achieved by a distracted, day-long back-and-forth on WhatsApp. But, like receiving a hand-written postcard in the mail — a sentence or two of mostly substanceless fluff, little of which has not been said innumerable times before — the meaning that a phone call carries extends infinitely beyond mere words. When Marshall McCluhan observed that “the medium is the message,” he meant that every communications technology shapes us individually and as a society far more than any of the content it carries. So, too, does a phone call convey meaning beyond its content; it says You’re important enough to me to go to this effort, to give you my full attention, to keep trying until we connect as humans instead of as commodified bags of data, demographics, and commercial potential.
Try it. Someone in your life needs a phone call today. Don’t warn them. Don’t try to schedule it around their work, life, the gym, the kids, dinner, and picking up the dry cleaning. Have a peek at the time in their local slice of the planet. Is it an outrageous hour of the day or night? No? Go ahead, call them. They may not pick up. Let’s be honest, they definitely won’t pick up. When they don’t, follow up with a text message: Nothing urgent. Would love to catch up on a call. Try me anytime.
Resist the urge to schedule. Opt, instead, for catching someone when they do not expect it, worried that you may be getting divorced, or are in jail, or dying, and will be relieved instead to find that you are ferociously and electrically alive.
The Zeitgeist Watch
The Global Day of Unplugging begins at sundown tonight, March 7, and continues for 24 hours until sundown Saturday. Join millions around the world who are giving themselves a short collective break from screens, the ongoing civilizational apocalypse, and the attention extraction economy to reconnect with what matters most.
A new report by the Education Department of South Australia reports startlingly encouraging results after their first year of phone-free schools.
A Wired magazine review of a new high-end cassette tape player applauds the “light hiss” the analog format delivers and celebrates the “unique difficulty of skipping songs” that reprioritizes the album format. Upshot: 9/10 (a whopping $160 at Amazon).
Jason Diamond could use a video rental store right about now: “It feels like now would be the exact right time to be in the business of renting physical media out to people.”
At the NYTimes, artist and anti-tech activist August Lamm writes about giving up her smartphone for a dumbphone. “I have watched many people attempt to reduce their screen time, an agonizing process requiring constant vigilance and self-restraint. Removing the option altogether, I’ve found, is the surest way out.”
A new smartphone app will prevent you from accessing other apps until it knows you’ve “touched grass” — literally. Unlocking other apps requires you to snap a photo with the app’s proprietary “smart grass detection” feature.
A powerful paean at Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel from 23-year-old Gabriela Nguyen on the many benefits of “appstinence,” her term for living without personal social media accounts and instead using direct-line communication like phone calls (see??)
Ted Gioia and Ross Barkan both double down, compellingly, on the notion of an ascendant “New Romanticism,” first sent up the flagpole a year ago in The Guardian. “It is too soon to predict a revival of the Luddites,” Barken observes, “but there are small pockets of young people ditching smartphones entirely; anti-tech activism seems, suddenly, to have some momentum.”
Technology advocates and celebrities are backing the launch of Free Our Feeds, a campaign designed to “save social media from billionaire capture.” Inspired by the decentralized (aka federated) network powering Bluesky, their vision is a social media ecosystem that exists beyond the idiosyncratic political control of the Broligarchy.
A new survey from The Verge and Vox Media digs deep into this moment of online fragmentation. Takeaways include “power is shifting back to the consumer” (case in point: the fediverse, see above); people crave community, but on their own terms, not those of platforms, advertisers, AI, and algorithms.
Cosmo drops what must be at least 5,000 words (TBH I did not count, but it sure felt long) on the newest accessory for 20-something women who’ve tired of the breakneck speed of modern life, dating apps, the loneliness epidemic and the trad wife movement: life in a convent as a nun? Seems a slight overreaction? But what do I know. “I see my life as balanced for the first time,” one says. “This is a slow, intentional way of living.”
How the Internet Made In-Store Shopping Miserable at The WSJ. “Physical stores today are understaffed and full of inconveniences such as locked shelves and self–checkout lines. Now, add one more gripe to the list: not enough stuff.”
Dazed asked young people what would make them happy again. Their responses might make a grown person cry, unless perhaps that person was Elon Musk: friends, jobs, cheaper food, livable wages, affordable healthcare, social justice, and most of all, community.