by Marie T. Sullivan | February 20, 2026

I am bereft.

Opening the mail early in the year 2026, I find a crisp letter from AT&T informing me that my landline will soon disappear. Copper wiring is obsolete, they tell me, while cheerfully offering to sell me alternative products and services.

For most of my life I had relied solely on a landline, which anchored me to an easy chair from which a caller invariably had my full attention. Never was I driving, cooking, shopping or bathing while conversing.

A few years back, friends and family insisted that I acquire a phone for the car, just in case. To their unanimous disdain I purchased a flip phone designed for seniors. It’s a marvel. It has excellent reception and is simple to use. It’s red, so I can find it in my purse. I use it to talk to people. I do not text, with rare exceptions, like receiving those annoying little access codes from the bank. It costs $28.53 per month.

Some time back I read of a trend. Certain CEOs, genuine captains of industry, were shedding their smartphones and returning to flip phones, to save time. For those who can do so, I recommend it.

I am not alone. Recently I spoke with two friends, both men, who largely eschew personal tech. They prefer reality. “Phones have taken over people’s lives,” says Friend #1. “I have a smartphone—I was pressured in to it—but it doesn’t leave the house. I have no idea how to operate it. I just talk to people on it, using it like a landline.” He is even clandestine: “I tell no one it’s a smartphone. They would start texting me.”

Friend #2 goes farther. He is younger and in construction, with his own business. He and his wife have eight children. “This stuff is ruining us as human beings,” he says. “People are losing the ability to interact with other people. They’re becoming blue-screen dopamine fiends.” His oldest kids now have phones, but with strict boundaries. What about his business? I ask. “At first my clients are surprised I use only a flip phone and don’t text. I just laugh. Later, when I finish a job ahead of time, they ask “How did you get it done so fast?” I tell them, “By not wasting time checking a phone every five minutes.”

One Thanksgiving, he reports, he and his wife and all eight kids got stuck in their van in Pennsylvania in a massive snowstorm at night. They were so immobilized and in so remote an area that they were actually preparing to spend the night in the van. There was a home nearby, owned by a Mennonite family also with eight kids. The father knocked on the van window and insisted that they come in the house and spend the night. A second stranded family was also invited in. “Pretty soon there were twenty-four children sitting on the floor in a circle, talking and laughing the way kids used to do. None of them owned phones. It was beautiful to see.” The Mennonite family had only a landline.

Here’s a secret. The human voice is full of information, emotion, and subtleties of speech that convey a great deal. When you and I speak by phone, I can hear if you’re taut or relaxed, genuine or pretentious. To some degree I can discern your age and level of maturity and education. In a job I held long before cell phones entered our lives, I had on occasion to make a few cold calls. In preparation, I would call my target at 10:00 pm the night before to hear their outgoing voice mail message and learn something about them. Young or old? Happy, sad, stressed? It was useful information. Such is the concept behind the legal practice known as voir dire (see/hear, also translated as “to speak the truth”).  An attorney interrogating you for jury selection can learn a great deal about you in seconds, just by seeing you and hearing you speak. Messages on a screen deliver no such insights. “You lose the fragrance of the human voice,” says Friend #2.  He waxes poetic. “Texting is like flowers with no fragrance.”

It also allows adult children to text “Happy Birthday, Dad” and not go see him.

Don’t get me wrong. Texting is wonderfully useful and convenient, so I’m told. I believe it. But we err in overusing it. We need more human contact.

A young woman I know works for a major state university in Chicago. She describes many students there as “zombies,” walking alone on campus, bent over their phones, speaking to no one, thoroughly atomized.

The harms inflicted on younger children by excessive phone use are so well documented I won’t raise them here. I’m happy to see, though, that manufacturers have now developed “Tin Can” cell phones for kids, the equivalent to a walkie-talkie, no doubt in response to parental concerns. No apps, no texting, no games. For more mature audiences, i.e. us nostalgic Boomers, they’ve come up with corded phones designed to resemble the phones of our youth, to be used as landlines but somehow bypassing the obsolete copper wiring. They recall to my mind the Princess Phone, a sleek instrument that was in the bedroom of every female teen from a well-to-do household in the ‘Sixties, to talk to their best friend on at great length.

“You don’t have a smartphone?” people ask incredulously. “I wish I could do that!” Not everyone can, but it’s lovely to be free of the TMT syndrome: Too Much Technology and the needless complication of the times in which we live.

 

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An Ohio native, Marie T. (Terry) Sullivan has lived in Chicagoland for all of her adult life. Her background is in music. For two years she served as culture editor for the now defunct Chicago Daily Observer.