Gen Z Are Such A Bunch of Pussies That They Are Taking College Courses To Learn To Battle Anxiety Over "Telephobia", AKA "Fear Of Talking On The Phone"

CNBC - Generation Z — Born between 1997 and 2012 — are struggling with telephobia, a “relatively recent phenomena” describing people who fear phone calls. 

“Telephobia is a fear or anxiety around making and receiving telephone calls,” Baxter told CNBC Make It in an interview.

“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,” she explained.

Baxter said that many of the college’s older pupils are expected to take telephone 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,” she said.

The college’s telephobia seminar is part of a series of career-related sessions to help bring pupils’ phone skills back up to scratch.

The session involves practicing a series of scenarios where you have to make a phone call, for example, calling the doctors to make an appointment, calling in sick to work, and other everyday scenarios. The pupils are expected to sit back to back to mimic a regular phone call where they can’t see the person on the other end and practice by using scripts.

Baxter said attending just one session boosts pupils’ confidence because it demystifies how phone calls really work.

It's times like these that I really miss KMarko. 

Nobody in the world was better at absolutely roasting college kids (and administrators) for being morons and/or pussies. I saw this headline, read this article and the entire time couldn't help but think of what a meatball of a story this is and how he would have put it into the third deck. Nonetheless, I will do my best to honor the tradition of highlighting pussification how I see it. 

There was a time, let's call it the glory days, when if you wanted to talk to someone, you picked up the Goddamned phone and dialed their number like a functioning adult. 

You didn’t agonize over it. 

You didn’t get the sweats about whether your voice would crack or if the person on the other end would *gasp* have the audacity to expect a two-way conversation.

But then Gen Z came along, and apparently, the idea of talking on the phone is now tantamount to being thrown into a gladiator pit. These kids, these delicate, hyper-online, anxiety-riddled creatures, are so terrified of the dreaded phone call that some colleges are now offering coaching seminars to teach them how to answer the thing they’ve been carrying in their pockets since birth.

Let’s just pause here. 

There are seminars for answering the phone. As in, professional educators have had to step in because a generation raised on technology can’t figure out how to use a device named after its most basic function. 

Fuckin incredible.

Higher education is apparently at the forefront of this revolution in basic human competency, offering classes on how to navigate telephobia. 

Yes, telephobia. The completely made-up, utterly laughable concept that people under 27 are so traumatized by the sound of a ringing phone that they’d rather endure physical symptoms of anxiety than just, you know, picking it up.

According to one career advisor, this all stems from a lack of experience. “They’ve simply not had the opportunity for making and receiving telephone calls.” 

What? 

Not had the opportunity? 

As if phone calls are some exclusive, invitation only, skull-and-bones-like secret society that Gen Z has been tragically barred from joining. We’re not talking about learning Latin here. We’re talking about speaking on the fucking phone.

It gets better. Schools are actually running practice sessions where these poor, sheltered kids role-play calling a doctor or, brace yourself, asking a store if an item is in stock. 

I kid not.

Apparently, having to cold-call a local Applebee’s to check if they still do half-priced apps after 9 PM is an act of courage on par with storming the beaches of Normandy.

And the excuses? 

Oh buddy, they are rich.

Gen Z apparently fears 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.” 

I hate to break it to these kids, but if you don’t pick up the phone and talk to people, life is going to be very, very difficult for you.

But let’s talk about what real phone fear was. 

Do you want to know what true fear is? 

Real fear is calling the house landline (yes, those were once a thing), of a girl you were trying to date, and having her father answer the phone. 

That’s fucking fear. 

That’s stepping into the lion’s den with nothing but a trembling voice and the desperate hope that he doesn’t grill you like a wartime interrogator.

You’d dial that number with your heart pounding, praying to whatever deity you believed in that she would pick up instead of her dad. 

But no chance. 

He always answered. 

“Who’s this?” he’d ask in that gruff, no-nonsense tone. 

And you, suddenly feeling like a small, weak child, had to muster the courage to say, “Uh, hi sir, may I speak to Jaime/Lindsay/Rachel/Etc.?” while trying not to sound like you were a degenerate punk looking to corrupt his daughter. 

That’s real fear, you pussies. 

Not the gentle buzz of an iPhone notification.

So now, they’re trying to rebrand phone calls as some sort of personal empowerment exercise. 

One of the instructors intevriewed by CNBC said, “If this telephone call is something that I do not want, I have the choice to end the phone call, and that gives me power.” 

My brother in Christ, that’s not empowerment, that’s hanging up. 

We’ve been doing that since rotary phones were a thing.

Look, it’s one thing to be introverted or prefer texting- it’s another to act like a ringing phone is a live grenade that you have to defuse with a team of therapists. 

Gen Z loves to talk about how they’re going to change the world, revolutionize work culture, and dismantle the system, but they can’t even handle an unexpected call from an unknown number. 

Good luck taking down capitalism when your biggest existential crisis is whether to let a call go to voicemail. You fragile fucking pussies.

And speaking of existential crises, what would happen if this generation had to face something real? Like, oh, I don’t know, World War II? 

Imagine for a second that the fate of civilization depended on Gen Z storming the beaches of Normandy or holding the line at the Battle of the Bulge. 

We would be doomed. 

Game over.

These kids are having panic attacks over talking to an Applebee’s hostess, how the hell would they handle fighting the Axis of Evil?

The Greatest Generation stormed machine-gun nests and liberated continents. 

This generation? They have anxiety about phone calls and need breathing exercises before ordering a pizza. I’d love to see them try to survive in a foxhole while complaining about the lack of vegan options in their MREs.

So, what’s next? Are we going to have “Walking into a Bank and Talking to a Teller 101”? 

A “Looking a Waiter in the Eyes While Ordering Food” workshop? 

The state of humanity in 2025 is astonishing.

We are so fucked. 

But nothing we haven't known, and the people making devices and apps haven't intentionally done, for years now. 

p.s. - She said the rise of telephobia can partly be blamed on the Covid-19 pandemic, during which young people became incredibly isolated.

“If they’ve missed out two years’ worth of social interaction and ebb and flow, then that obviously plays into how they’re feeling about being in social situations [and] in larger contexts, especially when they’re feeling uncomfortable.”

I say this all the time but it's because I want to be on the record 20 years from now as being the one who called it. When the Netflix documentary drops showing the hysteria and overreaction of the world to Covid during 2020-2022, and our kids and grandkids watch- much like how we watch docs today about the past - and they ask us, "what the fuck were you guys thinking back then?", we are going to go down as the dumbest generation of humans of all time. 

You know how when you see old cigarette ads of tv and movie stars back in the black and white days, like I Love Lucy peddling cigarettes to kids and talking about the health benefits of them and shit, and you think to yourself, "holy shit, I can't believe people were once that fucking dumb?" 

Yah, well buckle up buddy. The pics of people in astronaut suits in the grocery stores, spraying down their mail with Clorox bleach, and small businesses being raided by government agencies for having their doors open- all while Walmarts, Home Depots, and Best Buys were allowed to be open, are going to make us look like fucking neanderthals. And the money shot of course will be people spacing out 6 feet apart as theyr stand in line to board airplanes, just to be packed like sardines on top of each other once they get aboard the aircraft to breathe in circulated air. The list goes on and on and it should make for a great 20-part series. Good times. 

p.p.s. - Want to know what the definition of crazy is? 

“Strangely, a lot of our students are really comfortable on and prefer communicating via 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."

Can you think of anything worse to prefer communicating on?