by RACHEL SUGAR
IMAGE/Everett Collection/Shutterstock
Millennials have a reputation for being married to their phones: we text on them, we email on them, we navigate with them, we order Seamless on them, and then we play Candy Crush on them while eating our app-ordered Pad Thai.
According to the Millennial Generation Research Review, 80% of us even sleep with them.
But there is one thing many of us do not do on our telephones: Talk.
“The phone feels bizarrely invasive to me these days,” one 29-year-old writer tells Business Insider.
According to a 2013 Wall Street Journal article, millennials see the phone as “an interruption” — picking up the phone “without emailing first can make it seem as though you’re prioritizing your needs over theirs.”
For a generation who spent the hours after school Instant Messaging, calling can feel foreign — and presumptuous. “They don’t want to wing it,” complains writer Sandy Hingston in Philadelphia Magazine.
But according to Heidi Grant Halvorson, social psychologist and author of “No One Understands You And What To Do About It,” millennials aren’t wrong — there is something intimidating about the telephone.
It’s true, she says, that millennials are less practiced, having grown up with email and text and AIM. “If your dominant form of communication with people hasn’t been the phone,” she says, “then you’re going to naturally be more anxious using that form of communication.”
But it’s also true that telephone anxiety transcends generations. “Whether you’ve talked on the phone a lot or not, you still have to respond in the moment,” she explains. Without the option of editing yourself, “you’re more vulnerable.” In other words, if the phone feels high-pressure, that’s because it is high-pressure. “You have to respond immediately, so there’s a greater likelihood you’ll choke.”
Business Insider for more
(Thanks to reader)