I’m in my mid 40’s, late Gen X and I absolutely despise any phone calls I don’t decide to make myself, and out of respect for others who might feel like I do, I will try most other avenues of communication before resorting to a phone call.

I didn’t use to mind them at all back in the land line days, but as soon as everyone started getting cell phones there was this undercurrent of expectation that every moment of YOUR time actually belongs to someone else…because you’re AVAILABLE ANYWHERE NOW.

It started slow, but it didn’t get really bad until about 2007.

It got to the point where people would get your voicemail, hang up, and redial over and over until I answered. I saw it happening more and more frequently to myself and many others, from all walks of caller.

I finally started cutting people like that out of my life a few years ago because in the intervening decade and a half it hasn’t really gotten much better, except among the younger folks who just hate phone calls.

It’s almost like Self + Possibility of Instant Gratification = Utter Fuckwad much of the time.

It’s not about respect or anything, because fuck entitlement, but if it’s really not so ridiculously utterly important that I should be stopping mid-poop and doing something about it, LEAVE A MESSAGE. USE TEXT. USE E-MAIL, USE MESSENGER, USE ANYTHING ASYNCHRONOUS.

Too many people’s priority is themselves and only themselves to the outright blatant detriment of others.

It’s ridiculous, and I blame cell phones, social media, and large swaths of marketing and advertising firms for the cultural paradigm shift.

The drain on a person’s emotional and mental resources when they feel a social responsibility to their relationships with their friends and loved ones but are always forced to do things on everyone else’s “me first” terms is the exact same sort of phenomenon that causes workplace burnout when jobs do it with things like not setting up a good work/life balance and not being proactive/planning in regards to workplace tasks/projects/deadlines. (Agile is a major offender here, as is scrum, and every management book from traction to…hell, pick any one of them, everything I’ve been forced to read is borderling toxic when applied.)

Therapy’s great and all and I’m 100% in favor of it (for everyone, really), but when noone is respecting boundaries, there’s not a whole hell of a lot it’s going to do in this particular regard.

Hell, I know a lot of people whose boundary is “no phone calls unless (list of super serious things like someone died) or we text first and agree on a phone call” and when someone potentially has that boundary and then panicks when they get a phone call outside of it, the solution might be a little more advanced than “seek help”. It sucks, (and there’s plenty of room for nuance) but I feel the change in culture is far more at fault here than anything else.