Nearly all my friends are geographically distant. I prefer a text to an email but an email is better than a phone call. If someone does wish to call, it’s best to text first and see if I am busy. My ringer is never on unless I am expecting a call. These are stereotyped as the habits of the younger generations. They are criticized and dismissed as being impersonal enough that they will lead to the fall of civilization as we know it. But our society today is increasingly complex and what worked in the past is now insufficient. This outcome was created by businesses rather than the consumer. These are reasonable adjustments to our current reality. We have become a mobile society. We are itinerant workers but our seasonal relocations are based on the vagaries of trade, profit, loss and competition rather than the planting and harvesting of crops. We have friends and family scattered around the world. We spend time with them online. We don’t expect our friends to call us on the phone, we’ve been chatting all day. Most calls are no more welcome than the unsolicited knock on the front door.

I missed the party line era but not by much. But I did grow up in a time when people would come knocking at the door in their attempt to sell sets of encyclopedias, circus tickets, or cleaning supplies. Phone sales didn’t really take off until after the automation brought about by the information age. Before the ability to autodial, the customer had to reach out to a business phone by the phone book. But once the technology became available, businesses could reach out to possible customers directly with less effort. Those possible customers responded by getting answering machines and caller ID. We stopped answering our phones because we didn’t want to listen, or worse talk, to a sales representative. When we stopped answering, businesses fought back by using recorded messages to be left on our answering machines. In walked robocalls and we stopped answering the phone.

That lasted until the rise of mobile phones. It didn’t end the messages on the answering machine at home, but it did add another avenue for their attempts to make sales. They could now send messages to our voice inboxes and text us on our mobile phones. With mobile phones, we could shut the phone off, silence the notifications, and eventually block various forms of callers. Then they started using text push notifications. Initially, most of us had phone plans where we paid for each character received, or sent, by text. That brought about text shorthand – the ‘r u rdy c u sn’ stuff- and increasingly angry customers who were paying for business advertisements that they did not want. We then added unlimited texts and more creative ways to block unwanted messages. For every intrusion across our public/private borders by business we have attempted to create new guardians and gates.

As the boundaries between our public and private lives keep changing we rely more heavily on our ability to keep a modicum of control over how others can access our time and energy. Most of us have had that boss that will call us or text us at any hour or who will call on Saturday morning expecting us to come to work that afternoon. Many jobs now require employees to have their phones on and be available at all times. Social media is a large part of many companies’ marketing strategy and their visible footprint. Many of those young people that have their faces buried in their phones instead of talking to people sitting right next to them are not being rude. They’re living in the world that was created for them, not by them. They’re probably having a private conversation with someone right next to them. Or they might be checking on work. Maybe they’re taking the advantage of the first moment they’ve had since waking to relax. It could be that their grandmother just sent them a message while she’s awake in another time zone.

As always, change is inevitable. I don’t spend much time on my phone lately. I don’t have a boss that I am actively ignoring and I am no longer required to use my phone for my job. I live with my remaining family and see them every day. But I will pull out either a book or my phone if I happen to be in an establishment where there are television screens on every wall simultaneously showing as many sporting events as possible. I am surprised that sharing 4 screens is seen as less rude than having your own screen. Even some airplanes give us our own screen and expect us to use headphones. Privacy and respecting the personal boundaries of another person is more important than ever. It may look different today but I have enough memories of people complaining about someone wearing headphones, or reading a book, or blasting their music to just let it go.The youth aren’t being rude. The world isn’t falling apart because of kids these days. If we’re honestly concerned about the state of the world, it’s probably not the responsibility of the kids, it’s probably our fault and we should hurry up and fix it before it’s too late or we’re too old. Sales people will always find us.We will be shooing them away from our post-life social media eventually.

Don’t call me unless you text me first and let me know you’re going to call so I can turn on the ringer. Don’t count on leaving me a voicemail though, spam calls and scammers keep filling up the inbox. If you send me an email it might get sent to spam if you haven’t sent one before so probably text me if you do and I’ll know to look for it. We’re not back in the dark ages where we had to physically go knock on our friends’ doors to see if they could come out to play. That’s what texting is for.