Gen Z Creating Their Own Versions of Landlines With Cellphones

Tiffany Ng, a 24-year-old tech and culture writer based in New York, was too attached to her iPhone, so she did what humans do when trying to tame an unruly beast.

She chained it to a wall.

Ng felt she was spending too much time staring at her little screen and wanted an escape. Turns out she’s in good company. Over 40% of American adults — and 62% of those under 30 — say they are on their phones “almost constantly,” according to a Pew Research survey conducted in late 2023. Most Americans, including 81% of adults under 30, believe they use their phone too much, a 2022 Gallup survey found.

Ng’s desire to turn the supercomputer in her pocket into a makeshift landline is also one that’s shared by other zoomers and millennials. Some Americans are going full Luddite, giving up smartphones altogether in favor of so-called dumb phones, while some parents are easing their kids into technology by opting for classic landlines instead of iPhones.

There are also plenty of people who want a break from their screens but aren’t quite ready or able to ditch the conveniences of modern technology altogether. So instead of giving up their smartphones, some young people are creating setups that mimic landlines — by chaining their phone to the wall or creating a wall mount to “hang up the phone” rather than carry it with them all the time.

Yalda Uhls, a research psychologist and the founding CEO of the Center for Scholars and Storytellers at UCLA, said studies have shown that creating physical distance between yourself and your phone can make a big difference.

One study measured how participants completed tasks when they had their phones face down on their desk, in their pocket or a nearby bag, or in another room. The people who had their phones in another room performed the best.

“If you can see your phone, if you can grab it and walk around with it, you’re going to want to do that,” she told Business Insider. “If it’s separate from you, that’s the only time people stop really thinking about their phone.”

Business Insider talked to three young adults who said creating a physical boundary around their phone has drastically improved their screen time and their quality of life.

Bring back hanging up the phone

Maddie DeVico, a 31-year-old who works in sales for a software company in Denver, said she was feeling overwhelmed by her reliance on technology and trapped by the constant need to respond to messages quickly.

She romanticized the landline she had during her childhood in New Jersey and became obsessed with the idea of getting back to “hanging up the phone” — turning her device into something that she set down at the end of the workday rather than carry with her constantly.

So she took some leftover clay and made her own phone docking station. She hung it on her wall near her kitchen and started setting her phone there at the end of the workday. Initially, she noticed she would go back to it and pick it up to scroll, but after a brief transition period, she found herself setting it down and not picking it up the rest of the night.

“Once I started doing that, putting my phone away, I just stopped reaching for it all the time,” DeVico said. “And I just noticed this mental freeness that came with disconnecting. It was kind of a crazy shift.”

She said her screen time went down by three hours each day. Her friends learned that they were no longer going to get an immediate text back from her, and she even started leaving the phone in its dock when she left the house. She suddenly had more time to do other things, like cooking and crafting. She started spending more time in her garden just looking at bugs.

“I was so shocked with the amount of stress that left my body. It was life-changing in a way because I ran a little anxious before I started this habit,” she said.

When her friends come over for dinner, she also has them keep their phones away from the table, and as a result, she said they’re having more meaningful discussions about personal topics. After she posted about the phone dock on TikTok, she racked up nearly a million views and heard from hundreds of others about how they, too, are trying to bring back hanging up the phone.

“I think we’re just really genuinely trying to go back to living simpler without the chaos and without all the distractions,” she said.

A thirst for old-school tech and ‘simpler times’

Uhls, the UCLA researcher who often works with members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha, said young people are acutely aware of how much time they spend on their phones, and often make efforts to spend less time on them. She said even though they spend a lot of time on social media, they recognize that it’s not particularly deep or fulfilling.

“They’re craving connections and craving more meaningful experiences,” she said.

Some Gen Zers are so desperate for connection that they’ve embraced the Luddite movement. At an anti-technology rally in New York City last month, dozens of young people put Apple on a mock trial and smashed iPhones. Others are embracing “appstinence,” a term coined by a 24-year-old grad student at Harvard.

Chaining her phone to a wall was one of several experiments Ng has done as part of her newsletter, Cyber Celibate, which she uses to explore our relationship with technology. She’s also printed out her TikTok “For You” page to read like a newspaper and sent carrier pigeons instead of texts.

For the chain to the wall experiment, Ng gave her phone a full charge, unplugged it, and then put it on its leash by making creative use of a chain link belt. She was committed to leaving it there, even when she left the house, and not giving it another charge for a full week. She put a bench in front of it, where she could sit when she needed to use her phone, but that wasn’t comfy enough to make an endless scroll session appealing.

The first couple of days, Ng said she would look forward to going home and being able to scroll on her phone. But when she finally opened her special media feed, that excitement was met with the “very anti-climactic experience of looking at pictures of Alix Earle,” an influencer.

“The almost religious experience of being on your phone kind of loses its aura,” she said. “It’s very alluring, but it’s not satisfying at all.”

One of the most surprising things she found was how “out of sight, out of mind” her phone really was. When she met up with friends in the park, worked from a coffee shop, or even just during her commute, she didn’t find herself reaching for her phone the way she expected to. Instead, she started to notice her surroundings — like the buildings around the train station she frequents or how people act differently on the L train versus the 2.

“I don’t want to sound overdramatic, but toward the end, it really felt like I was reentering real life in a way,” Ng said.

Ng said she thinks Gen Z is pining for simpler technology and simpler times (she recently was delighted to learn what dial-up internet was). While the experiment lasted a week, she still continues to actively leave her phone in another room, or even leave it behind when she gets out of the house, somewhere close by.

Best of both worlds

Not everyone romanticizing the days of the landline is against modern technology.

Catherine Goetze is the creator of CatGPT, an online media brand focused on AI education. The millennial content creator worked in tech before amassing hundreds of thousands of followers with helpful videos intended to make AI more accessible.

But Goetze also had a desire to be reachable without being tethered to her smartphone. So a couple of years ago, she bought an old rotary phone and some special parts and turned it into a Bluetooth device connected to her cellphone.

When someone called her cellphone, her “landline” rang, so she could be alerted to incoming calls without also having to be open to every other potential phone notification. She could also make calls by simply picking up the phone and dialing. She even made it so that when she dialed star, it would activate Siri, and she could direct it to call contacts by name, eliminating the need to memorize or look up a number.

This summer, when she posted a video showing off the landline phone she’d been using for years, her comments were full of people saying they needed one too. That’s how Goetze decided to start Physical Phones, which makes and sells Bluetooth phones like the one she herself uses.

“It is not realistic to throw your smartphone into a river,” Goetze said, adding, “The Physical Phone says, ‘Look, keep your iPhone. But there are still ways that you can regain some level of balance and intentionality about achieving that balance.”

The phones are currently available for presale and expected to start shipping in November or December, but early signs are encouraging. Goetze said when they first launched, they generated $118,000 in pre-sales in 72 hours.

She said she thinks the orders are from a mix of millennials who are nostalgic for the landlines of their past, and zoomers who don’t remember having a landline but are just as nostalgic and apt to romanticize that time, as evidenced by the resurgence in shows like “Friends” and Y2K fashion.

Goetze said she doesn’t think most people want to live in a world without modern technology, but rather one where they are using that technology mindfully, rather than being used by it.