Why Does It Take So Much Emotional Energy Now Just To Make A Simple Call To A Friend?
Craving connection more than ever, yet fearing the task of actually connecting.
halfpoint | Canva She’s been on “my list” to call for weeks now — probably months. Janine is one of my true-blue friends, a work colleague from the trenches. She can bring me to belly laughs. We both fought our way up the ladder of a voice-over career in Los Angeles and love exchanging war stories and successes. Or at least, we used to. I
I need to call my friend Charlie, too, and keep putting it off.
My other friend, Sonal, and I are in an epic game of non-stop phone-tag and text-tag, too. Yes, people are busy surviving, but it goes deeper. This isn’t just one friend, but several.
In the last three to four years, something’s shifted: Why does it make so much emotional energy now just to make a simple phone call?
Ekateryna Zubal / Shutterstock
Sure, my friends and I text a lot, but there’s a resistance to committing the time to picking up the phone or starting a video chat.
I can’t even use the old “no time” excuse. I’ve had plenty of weekend evenings that would work. I’ve had windows of hours. I’ve thought about calling Janine. But then I resist, and excuses come.
I’m embarrassed it’s been so long. We’ll have too much to catch up on, and it’s going to take too long to get past the awkward phase.
She might be having a good day, but I don’t want to bring her down, discussing my fears over world events.
So the phone call gets pushed to “tomorrow.” Another missed opportunity to connect. A deliberate choice, another day passing, another chance to stay stuck in my whirlwind of thoughts, another quiet step into a more hermit-like existence.
And somehow I know I’m not alone in this. My friend, Marti, was the first to mention it. COVID restrictions had been lifted. For two solid years, closed off from the world and in our bubbles, we dreamed of this day, the chance to reconnect and bond.
We were now free to go back to normal life, socializing in restaurants, grabbing drinks, or snagging coffee with office-mates and pals.
“I’m having a hard time feeling any motivation to socialize,” Marti said. “I feel a resistance to initiating get-togethers. It’s like I’ve forgotten how or gotten shy and complacent, or scared. It seems like it takes so much energy. How did we do all that before 2020?”
I felt for Marti, but knowing she’d battled depression before, I assumed that was the issue. But over the months, I kept hearing the same from multiple friends, now more content to go it alone at home, too much anxiety bubbling up in facing social gatherings or video calls. And then, in 2024, the “affliction” showed up in my own life.
Type-A personality I am not, but I’ve always been one to come away from most social interactions feeling reinvigorated (as long as it’s not a business cocktail party with blowhards), kind of like a mini-extrovert.
What changed in me — within humanity — to bring on this feeling of having to talk oneself into calling up the people I love most?
To build oneself up with some monumental amount of emotional energy just to pick up the phone and “commit,” even when calling best friends?
When did we get so comfortable with text-thread communication that even the notion of picking up the phone to call a friend can induce such angst? Even worse, that deigning to call someone could now be seen as rude?!?
In the height of the COVID lockdowns, I was certain we were experiencing a global reset that would lead to more kindness, a resetting of priorities, and a return to basic values.
Imagine my surprise, it seems to have done the exact opposite — price gouging through the roof, corporations no longer even pretending to care about customers’ needs, nations in more conflict than ever, and humans craving connection but more comfortable hiding at home, going it alone.
I’m realizing the truth about my reticence to pick up the phone: the daily emotional landmines in our nonstop news cycle.
What latest atrocity are we facing today? Which atrocity have we already forgotten about, 24 hours later? It takes a lot of effort, daily, to regulate the emotions within ourselves to get through one day at a time and not shut down or overreact. So, how does this work when encountering others?
Even if I’ve successfully avoided nonstop news for a bit, the person I’m calling might bring something up, may need to talk about it, and then we’re off to the races and mired in the (justified) complaining.
What if Janine is having a good day? Do I want to bring her down by calling and bringing up my legit fears of losing my health insurance? That AI keeps coming for all my income streams?
That these rainy floods a sure sign of climate change in action? Am I helping if I let her vent about ICE agents storming through LA, the wildfires, and the loss of industry work, or are we just co-dependently making things worse by dwelling on them?
Sure, sometimes a friend needs to chat, but what if I become that friend, the one who’s always bringing someone down, or becomes a burden?
Even in the world of caller ID, we second-guess. Maybe I should text first and see if it’s a good time to call. As if our friends, full-grown adults, don’t have the agency to look at their caller IDs and let it go to voicemail if they don’t have the time or emotional energy to answer in the moment.
I long to return to the days when we just picked up the phone and called dear friends with the simple question, “Hey, what’s up?”
No hour-long catch-up after six months needed, just a weekly seven-minute hello. I don’t have the answer for this weird anti-social moment we're in, but I’m happy to report that I reconnected with Janine by phone yesterday. Same with Charlie later that night.
It took a ridiculous amount of self-chiding and confirming that I had the window of time and the right mental space and energy to get through it all. Oh, how I wish to kick that to the curb. But we did it!
It was fine. We were all happy to connect, commiserate, and feel less alone. If you’re lucky to still have a close friend in this world, give yourself a firm talking to and take the risk.
Make the call. Leave the voicemail. In a pinch, send an unprompted voice memo straight to their phone — no need to pressure them into a chat, no need for them to check voicemail, but a way for them to hear your voice saying you’re thinking of them.
Yesterday, a reader of my stories commented that she was seeing the return of landline phones into some friends’ homes, a sort of fight against the smartphone distraction landscape, and a return to slowing down.
It made me smile — ahh, good old-fashioned phone calls, curled up in a cozy chair, sharing details with a compatriot as you both battle through life. May we end the six-month epic text thread, surprise the world (and ourselves), and spread some love and understanding through the phone.
Joe Guay is a full-time voiceover actor who writes on mental health, travel, showbiz, gay life, and surviving life through humor.
