Did Millennials Accidentally Kill Our Friendships When We Killed Phone Calls?

Making and getting lots of phone calls was a raison d’etre for millions of Millennial girls in particular, but once we hit our thirties, the phone became the equivalent of junk mail. Did this have unintended consequences?

Rachel Presser
12 min readDec 29, 2020

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young woman in white-blonde wig wearing an orange jacket talking on a hot pink corded phone on dusty rose background
Licensed via Adobe Stock

Millennials, especially those of us on the older end who were born in Reagan’s second term, are a generation of many dualities. Duality comes up in so much of my work and I always thought it was just because of a vast amount of personal circumstances and life events.

But it turns out my entire generation is riddled with them. Our lives have been colored by hope and doom alike, and we watched technology and communications advance at different speeds.

We saw the end of the old world and the last decade of relative stability and prosperity for many Americans. We grew up with technology as it evolved, and for this very brief point in time before the social media boom of the late 2000s —the elder side of the Millennial cohort truly had the best of times where we were on the cusp. We had the best of the early 1990s with its toe still in the analog 1980s, and the early tech and Internet culture of the late…

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Rachel Presser

Game dev, writer, small biz & tax consultant to indie devs. That loud socialist Frog Slut from The Bronx, now in Angel City. https://linktr.ee/sonictoad