‘No, I’m not phoning to say I’m dying!’ My gruelling week of calling gen Z friends rather than texting them

Phone calls can be inconvenient, stressful or actively unpleasant - especially if you're part of my generation. At 27, can I survive seven days without texts or group chats? And will I still have a social life at the end?

In the listless early weeks of January - my resolutions for self-improvement already gone to the dogs - I was asked to conduct an experiment that those in my life who are over 40 deemed lovely", and everyone else regarded with unbridled horror: I was asked to spend a week picking up the phone and calling people rather than texting.

What a cakewalk, you say. Not quite, say those aged 18 to 34 - 61% of whom prefer a text to a call, and 23% of whom never bother answering, according to a Uswitch survey last year. Such is the pervasiveness of phone call anxiety that a college in Nottingham recently launched coaching sessions for teenagers with telephobia", and a 2024 survey of 2,000 UK office workers found that more than 40% of them had avoided answering a work call in the previous 12 months because of anxiety.