I really miss the days of landline phones. Landline phones allowed a mobility that mobile phones don't. (Ironic, yes?)
Having a mobile phone as my main contact number seemed to make sense after I got out of college. I'm 24 now, and I'm still moving around as I try to figure out where I want to live and what I want to do. Landlines seemed like an unnecessary extravagance.
Now, however, mobile phones demand my availability to the world for as long as it's on my person (and even when it isn't, because the loss of it displays me as negligent and even uncaring.) It's my own choice to keep my main point of contact via my mobile phone, but attitudes towards the mobile have changed since its birth.
My parents, for example, expect to use my mobile to keep tabs on me and to contact me regularly, even going so far as to guilt me if I don't answer my phone when they call, and they call for great and small reasons daily, urgent and inconsequential, which mobile phones can't filter. (It used to be that mobiles were only under duress of emergency, and everything else went to the landline,)
I spent my formative years in the world of landline phones, much like my parents did, and understood that distance from outside contacts for periods of time when I was away from my home were important in fostering memories, connections, and experiences. It's completely analogous to how millenials my age are portrayed today - surgically tied to their technology and internet. Friends my age understand how to contact a person carrying a mobile. I will answer them readily when they call because I know it is urgent and they need something right away.
On the other hand, people from my parents generation use the phone more obsessively than we do,
a well documented phenomenon, perhaps stemming from a life devoid of such technology to the degree that its existence is a novelty to be abused. My parents text/call back and forth between themselves a million times a day for bewilderingly unimportant things. While staying with me, my mom even told me before going to sleep to text my dad to let him know we were sleeping, as if this were a crucial and monumentous event.
Given this kind of obsessive use by the older generation, it's no wonder my parents think I communicate less consistently and reliably than they do. Here's a tip: look up
differentiation.
You too, young adults, if you ever wanted to know why you get the strong urge to separate from your parents and think that every tidbit you share with them, every call you take, is an infringement on your independence. No worries, I feel the same right now.
In the world of mobile phones, parents expect their children to keep in contact with them 24-7, even in the years when children are supposed to strike out on their own and learn how to live by themselves. Landline phones facilitated that. They made reaching out to other people easier, but somewhere along the way, we degraded the line between the facility of reach out vs. the agency of not letting others in.
In the world of my parents, not picking up the phone at all times is a deliberate refusal of their right to get ahold of me wherever I am and whatever I'm doing. To me, it's giving up my right to privacy to those parties who should understand what life was like before everyone had to be connected up at all times.
Maybe that's why I'm thinking about this at almost 2 in the morning on a sleepless workday that will demand all of my attention, a workday in which I will need to split that attention to my phone every hour. And maybe I'm sitting here drinking gin and drunk-blogging because after a lifetime of trying to be the best that I can, I might as well act like a "shitty child" to my parents if I'm going to be hung for a sheep as a lamb.
I look forward to a day when I'm not expected to be on call every hour of the day. I look forward to turning off my phone without feeling guilty about irresponsibility. I look forward to investing in a landline phone to make some memories and experiences and pathways for myself.
EDT: I am really fucking tired and angry and weepy and powered on gin. Any typos are my own.
EDT:
More on the changing use of landline/mobile phones.
