There was once a time when if you wanted to speak to someone on the phone, you simply picked up the phone, dialed their number, and then spoke to them like a functioning adult. But now with endless choices and channels for communication, Gen Z are overcome with anxiety by the idea of answering the thing that they’ve been carrying around in their pockets since birth.

Generation Z — born between 1995 and 2012 — are apparently struggling with telephobia, a ‘relatively recent phenomena’ describing people who fear phone calls. Liz Baxter, a careers advisor at Nottingham College, a higher education school for pupils aged 16 to 18, told CNBC:

“Telephobia is a fear or anxiety around making and receiving telephone calls.

“They’ve [Gen Z] just simply not had the opportunity for making and receiving telephone calls. It is not the main function of their phones these days, they can do anything on the phone, but we automatically default to texting, voice notes, and anything except actually using a telephone for its original intended purpose, and so people have lost that skill.”

Baxter said that many of the college’s older pupils are required to undertake phone interviews as a pre-screening for job applications and were “falling at that hurdle,” because they lacked the awareness and confidence of navigating a call.

“In a class of 25 to 30 students, I would imagine at least three-quarters of them will experience and admit to anxiety about not using the telephone.”

And so, Nottingham College created a telephobia seminar to help bring their hyper-online, anxiety-riddled students’ phone skills back up to speed. The session involves reading from scripts to practice a series of scenarios where you have to make a phone call, for example, calling your GP to make an appointment, calling in sick to work, and other everyday scenarios. Unbelievable, right?

Last year, a Uswitch survey of 2,000 U.K. adults found that almost a quarter of 18 to 34-year-olds never pick up phone calls, and around 61% prefer to receive a message rather than an audio call.

Over half of 18-to-24-year-olds think an out-of-the-blue phone call means bad news, while 48% prefer to communicate using social media, and over a third prefer voice messages.

Gen Z are also concerned with how they sound on calls as they have no visual feedback to confirm how they’re doing, Baxter noted:

“Strangely, a lot of our students are really comfortable on Microsoft Teams because they can see the visual clues. They can read your face. They can judge your reactions. They can see how they’re doing.

“I think that plays into a large part of the anxiety when it comes to audio only calls. They can’t see you. They think that you’re laughing at them, or they think that you are judging them, so they’re not getting that response back from you in order to assure themselves of how they’re doing.”

Incredible. Gen Z fear phone calls because they can’t see the other person’s facial expressions and are worried that the person on the other end is laughing at them. They actually prefer communicating on Microsoft Teams because they can watch the other person’s face and feel assured that they aren’t being laughed at. I guess it does make sense, but it’s just such an interesting look into the way that Gen Z brains work (or at least, the section of them who are suffering from telephobia and making their peers look bad).

Well anyway, best of luck to these boys and girls on overcoming their telephobia. Can’t look away from their phones, but yet fear using them for their original purpose. What a world.

For the TikToker who went live to cry about about the reality of working her first ever 9 – 5 job, click HERE.