Why Don’t We Have Landlines Anymore?

Remember landlines? I know, I know, this question will force some of you (like me) to reveal your age if you reply with “yes”. But to those of you who were born long after phones escaped from walls and evolved into omnipotent creations with no tails but digital tentacles, I am referring to those clunky plastic bricks tethered to the wall by a cord that somehow managed to get tangled into an impossible sailor’s knot if you so much as looked at it wrong. They sat there, immovable, like a sacred household monument to permanence. A landline said: I live here. This is my number. Find me if you can. Now? Forget it. We don’t even stay in the same apartment long enough for a pizza delivery guy to figure out the buzzer code.

We have evolved into creatures of motion who treat permanence like it’s contagious. Why commit to a house, a job, or heaven forbid, a phone number, when you can reinvent yourself every 18 months and send out that awkward “Hey, new number, who dis?” text? Having a landline would mean admitting that you might actually stay put long enough for someone to call you there. Unthinkable! Instead, we demand mobility. We need to be “virtually” present everywhere—at brunch in Berlin, at the beach in Bali, and spiritually crying in a Trader Joe’s parking lot all at once. Landlines don’t support our grand illusion of omnipresence. You can’t Instagram your avocado toast if your phone is bolted to drywall.

Then there’s that blasted accessibility that hovers around like drunken ghosts of ancestors. Once upon a time, if the phone rang during dinner, your mom would say: “Sit down, they’ll call back.” Today? If someone doesn’t respond to a WhatsApp message within four minutes, we assume they’ve been kidnapped or even worse, ran out of data. We need to be available 24/7 to share crucial life updates: our geotagged latte order, the dog’s bathroom habits, or the thrilling footage from our doorbell cam of a squirrel committing acorn theft. All vital intelligence, obviously.

Here’s the thing: landlines required us to remember numbers because it was literally a matter of life or death by walking home. I bet you could rattle off half your friends’ digits in high school. Now? Ask me my own phone number and I need a ten-second buffering period. Our mobiles are basically hard drives where we outsource everything: phone numbers, banking details, passwords, and that random 32-character Wi-Fi code scrawled on the back of a router. We’ve outsourced so much memory that if someone dropped us in the wilderness with nothing but a Nokia 3310, we’d die, not because of hunger, but because we wouldn’t remember our cousin’s number to call for help.

And let’s not forget the focus problem. Back in the day, you called someone on a landline and you had a proper conversation, one where both parties were fully present. That’s it. No push notifications. No Candy Crush. No “let me just check one email while you’re talking” or “I’ll put you on speaker while I google something.” Now, even when we’re on the phone, we’re not really on the phone. We’re multitasking, doom-scrolling X, trading crypto, or googling “Is it bad if my cat swallowed rocks?” while someone is trying to tell us about their day.

There was one glorious feature of landlines that mobile phones could never replicate: the ability to slam the receiver down. Nothing says “conversation over” quite like hanging up with a thunderous clack that reverberated through the other person’s eardrum and possibly their soul. It was punctuation, it was closure, it was therapy. Try doing that with an iPhone. The best you can manage is an aggressive tap on the red button, which has all the drama of closing a calculator app. Not the same. Definitely not the same. 

• The Rotary Behemoths of the 1950s: Heavy, indestructible, and slow as molasses. You wanted to call someone? Hope you’ve got a minute to spin that dial around and another minute for it to slowly tick back. By the time you finished dialling, the person had either solved their crisis or died.
  
• The Plastic Disco-Era Phones of the 1970s: Same rotary nonsense, just in groovy avocado green or mustard yellow. They didn’t match anything in your house, but at least they looked like props from a low-budget cop show.
  
• The Cordless Revolution of the 1980s: Suddenly you could walk around the house while talking! You felt like a Wall Street executive even though you were just gossiping with your neighbour about who put flamingos in Mrs. Henderson’s yard. The downside? That giant antenna you had to pull out—half sword, half fishing pole. And if you wandered too far, the signal cut out, making you sound like you were broadcasting from the moon.

So no, we don’t have landlines anymore. Because we don’t sit still, we don’t commit, we don’t remember, and honestly? We don’t even listen. But hey, at least we can FaceTime from the bathroom, and really, isn’t that what progress is all about?