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Jan. 27, 2024 - The Matt Walsh Show
11:43
Is Gen Z's Aversion To Phone Calls Justified? [Weekly Walsh Original]

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Well, it's going to seem like this is shaping up to be another segment where I rip on Gen Z, but it's not.
Well, at first it will be, but not for the whole time.
And that's the best I can do.
So we begin with this article from the New York Post, headline, Gen Z speaks out on the simple act that brings them to tears.
I would freak out.
And the fun clickbait game we're supposed to play is to guess which simple everyday activity brings these young adults to tears.
And it's sort of a trick question, though, because literally any simple everyday activity has that potential.
But in this case, the activity is making a phone call.
So, reading.
The simple act of making a phone call has emerged as one of Gen Z's greatest weaknesses.
With phones being so easily accessible and attached to almost every young person's hand, you might expect Gen Z to be able to perform one of the most mundane tasks, picking up the phone and dialing.
Unfortunately, the reality is, the very thought of making a call is often accompanied by a sense of dread and impending failure for some.
Most subject matter experts believe this apprehension to phone calls is associated with social anxiety.
Social anxiety stems from the fear of judgment or humiliation.
Texting and using apps such as Snapchat prevents mistakes from being made.
Texting allows Gen Z to proofread and keep track of their conversation.
Now, hang on one second.
If anyone of any generation is proofreading their text messages, or any other message that they post or send on the internet, that's definitely news to me.
Because Gen Z very clearly is not proofreading anything.
Although they're still better in that regard than baby boomers who are, for some reason, renowned for their spelling, syntax, and punctuation errors.
Not to mention their inordinate love of the ellipsis.
Which I don't quite understand, but that's neither here nor there.
Let's continue.
News.com.au spoke to high school and university students to explain their fear.
If I had to make a phone call, I would freak out, one said.
When I do make a call, I usually sit down and write potential responses to what I think they'll say to me, just so I'm prepared.
Another said that it was best just to stay away from phone calls.
It feels like I'm not reinforcing the statement, stranger danger, she said.
It's been a warning we've all grown up with.
Erin McGovern, 21, told News.com.au that any thought of making a phone call is anxiety-inducing.
If I'm tasked with calling someone important, the prospect might bring me to tears, she said.
The sense of fear of failure contributes to my heightened sense of stress associated with phone calls.
Typically, I'll prepare by jotting down what I want to say on paper and imagine what the other person might say, she said.
If the other person doesn't respond how I imagined, my reaction and response becomes awkward.
So you get the idea.
Very, very upset.
Reduced to tears by phone calls.
I have to do something I don't want to do.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
I do not want to do this!
And it continues with more examples of...
of young people who go to elaborate lengths to avoid phone calls or who prepare for a phone call like it's the MCATs or something.
I'm not sure I've ever spoken on the phone to someone in Gen Z before for any extended period of time, but I'm sure I have.
But if I ever do again, now that I know that they're writing their responses ahead of time, it would be fun to throw some stuff at them that they didn't prepare for.
I wasn't prepared for this.
I need to prepare.
You know, start the conversation like, hey, How's it going, by the way?
Did you know that a reindeer's eyeballs turn blue in winter?
Just a curveball.
They don't have anything in their notes for that.
You can be pretty sure.
Have them scrambling and looking through their notes for a response.
Hang on.
Blue, you say?
Wow.
All right.
And then he just bursts into tears.
And that's how I imagine the conversation going, which would be kind of funny.
Now, of course, as far as Gen Z is concerned, this all has very little to do with phone calls, per se.
The problem is much bigger than that.
This is why I emphasize this all the time, because I think it's something that still hasn't quite, it doesn't quite sink in for us.
They are the first generation of humans in world history to be raised in an environment where a majority of their communication is not done through spoken language.
What did you say?
For every other generation of humans that has ever existed, almost all of the conversing that they did on a daily basis, almost all of the communicating they did on a daily basis, was conducted, whether in person or by phone, through spoken communication.
But for Gen Z, most of them were in elementary school, and the rest weren't even born.
Help me!
Get me out of here!
When the iPhone was introduced, And so they've had smartphones since they were young children, a lot of them.
And so a majority of the conversation interaction that they have on a daily basis, since they were small children, has happened through that device.
Using visual communication.
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Now, millennials are barely in a better position.
Smartphones took over our lives right around the time we graduated high school or college, depending on how old we are.
And so our adult lives have been dominated by these devices.
But for Gen Z, their entire lives have been consumed by them, which is to say they don't really know how to speak to people.
Do the chickens have large talons?
I don't understand a word you just said.
They've been conditioned to, and it's not their fault, they've been conditioned to communicate through memes and gifs and emojis and choppy internet slang.
That is so fat.
And again, communicating almost entirely visually.
It's not to say they don't talk to people around them.
But if you're on your phone 10, 12 hours a day, you're constantly communicating in one form or another with other people.
So it's like expecting a child raised by wolves in the forest to come back to civilization and hold a coherent conversation with you.
It's just not going to happen.
And that's the problem.
And then, like, how does this problem compound itself?
What does the exponential growth look like?
Years from now, when you've got another generation who were also raised on the phones, almost all their communication visually, but they were raised by parents who themselves were raised that way.
We are going to get to a point, I think, idiocracy, people say it's prophetic, but idiocracy, from what I remember, they went 500 years in the future and people, you know, the average IQ was like 70 or 60 or something.
I think they were very optimistic.
I think if something doesn't radically change in the next 150 years, I think people are going to be communicating.
The verbal in-person communication will basically be grunts and hand gesturing.
There's going to be basically no coherent verbal communication at all.
That's where we're headed.
Now, with all that said, putting all that to the side, they are not wrong about phone calls, though.
Now, they may be wrong to cry about it, but it is true that there is very rarely a good reason for a phone call to be made or received.
And I was out ahead of this curve five years ago when I canceled phone calls on this show.
In fact, I think that was one of the very first things I canceled when we first started this segment.
It amazes me still every day that in the year 2020, there are still people, lots, even probably billions of people who will intentionally pick up their phone, dial a number, and attempt to have a purposeful live conversation with another human being on the other end.
Which means that for the last five years, none of you should be making phone calls because they were already canceled.
You should know that.
There's no need for me to rehash it because I'm going to assume that all of you have listened to every single episode for the past five years.
But on the off chance that a few of you have neglected your duties in consuming every piece of content that I have ever produced, then I will just reiterate the basic point, which is, you know, I am an advocate of face-to-face human communication.
I'm not necessarily a fan of that either in every context, but... It's a bad time, Bob!
From a personal and civilizational perspective, it is the most worthwhile and productive form of communication.
But long-form writing, like writing books and letters, is second to that.
And then what you have online is distant behind it.
But if you're going to communicate with someone in a non-face-to-face format, it can almost always be handled quicker and more efficiently with a text or email.
So, you know, we've all been in the situation where you send somebody a text with a simple question or statement and horrifically, they call you to respond to it.
Like you send them a text and then you look down and you see their number popping up on your phone.
And there are a few feelings worse than that.
Not feelings that you're going to cry, but just like a mixture of irritation and befuddlement.
It's just like, why are you doing this?
We're texting.
Why are you doing this?
And then the response ends up being something that could have been conveyed in one sentence via text.
Even worse, you'll have someone text you to set up a phone call, to schedule a call.
I mean, I'll be honest, I have people in my phone right now that have been texting me for like months.
It'll schedule a call.
It's like, for all this time, whatever you want to say, just say it.
And then we schedule it, and the day finally comes, and we do our little call.
And it turns out that whatever needed to be said could have been said in the very text that were used to schedule the call in the first place.
The problem is that most people really have no idea, and this goes back to a lack of spoken communication, they have no idea how to end a conversation, especially one that's happening on the phone, because a lot of the visual cues are not there.
So the discussion that should be, by all rights, 30 seconds long becomes 5 minutes or 30 minutes, as the few sentences they needed to convey have already been conveyed, and now it has to be padded with like 50 pounds of small talk.
To the extent that Gen Z is objecting to all of that, they're actually fully justified, and I feel it's necessary to point that out.
In fact, you could make an argument that phone companies should be mandated to disable the phone function.
Like, the actual phone function on the phone should be disabled because there's really no reason why anyone needs to use it for that purpose anymore.
Except for kids.
It's the opposite.
Like, if they do have phones, it should only be to make phone calls and not to do any of the internet stuff.
So you have to adjust the laws accordingly.
Better yet, I guess, I guess what it comes down to is probably We should all just toss our phones in the ocean and be done with the whole thing.
Might not be the healthiest for the fish, but it would be better for us.
But until that happens, I'm not going to judge Gen Z for their phone call aversion.
So who am I cancelling?
I guess phones are cancelled.
Again.
Except the one you're using to listen to this right now.
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