Your phone rings out of nowhere on a Tuesday afternoon. It's a friend you haven't spoken to in months, someone you actually like. But you let it ring. You wait and type, “Hey! Can't talk right now, is everything okay?”
If you're a millennial or young adult in the US, that scene probably needs no explanation. And lest anyone call it rude or avoidant, there’s a mounting body of research indicating that it’s not. It might actually be the smarter way to communicate.
According to a 2017 survey by LivePerson that polled more than 4,000 adults aged 18–34 across six countries, 73.7% of US millennials and Gen Z said they communicate with others more digitally than in person, and when asked to choose between keeping only a phone app or a messaging app on their smartphones, 73.4% of US respondents chose messaging. The numbers aren’t surprising. The more interesting question is why?
The staircase problem nobody tells you about
The French have a word for a very particular feeling: the wit of the staircase, or esprit de l'escalier . It describes the perfect thing you should have said, arriving thirty seconds too late, when you're already halfway out the door. The phrase traces back to French philosopher Denis Diderot, who described the feeling after failing to find the right words during a dinner party exchange, and the term stuck. Anyone who has ever hung up a call and immediately thought, "That's what I should have said," knows exactly what he meant.
Phone calls, especially those without warning, are a kind of live performance. There's no pause button, no undo. You’re not fine, but you say you are. You agree to things you didn’t want to agree to. You tell a joke that bombed. And then the real you walks back into the room and looks at the wreckage.
