A decade of life on lock screens has yielded a curious reversal: Some are rediscovering the modest landline.
It’s not nostalgia alone. With screen fatigue reaching new heights and attention constantly in pieces, a simple ring-and-speak device becomes something rare: focusing. The result is something of a landline revival, not in copper-wire subscriptions necessarily but in the way we behave, design, and communicate.
Why Calls Trump Infinite Feeds for Focus
Smartphones are designed to keep you tapping; a phone call is designed to hang up. That friction matters. Research out of the University of Texas at Austin has found that people who have a smartphone in their field of vision — even if it’s face down on a desk and they can’t actually see it — do worse on cognitive tasks than people who don’t. Strip out push notifications, badges, and feeds and you reduce the chances of compulsive switching, which is strongly associated with a sense of mental fogginess or stress.
There are additional cognitive benefits to talking audio-only. Research by Michael Kraus has shown that, compared with text, people are better at picking up on emotion and empathy through voice. In practice, a landline encourages a one-task-at-a-time exchange at human speed — long enough to connect, short enough not to encourage the rabbit-hole dynamics of apps built for endless scroll.
The New Landline Isn’t Your Grandparents’ Phone
Obviously, this comeback isn’t just about depositing copper. It’s there to make a “call-only” surface in a home or office. Bluetooth desk phones that pair with your mobile number have been quietly surging in popularity, allowing you to take and make calls even if your smartphone is not in reach. There, major consumer phone companies do sell “connect-to-cell” systems for exactly this purpose: the ringer on your desk, the distractions on your side table.
Creators and startups are embracing the aesthetic as well. One popular approach from educator Catherine Goetze suggests imagining a vintage handset that makes calls through your smartphone but without the screen involved in any way. There is a demand for this shift to “analog mode” — it echoes another: young people are starting to buy their elders’ feature phones, an inconspicuous indicator that friction-by-design may start soon to be a wellness choice.
Proof Your Brain Prefers Fewer Tabs and Distractions
This is in line with decades of attention research, which advise that we should simplify communication. Stanford-launched work on media multitasking has associated heavy task-switching with weaker sustained attention and memory. A randomized study at the University of Pennsylvania of limiting social media use found that well-being improved among those who used social media less — including decreases in loneliness and depression — which is to say, limits themselves can be therapeutic.
On the household level, the change is dramatic: as of late 2022, 72.6% of U.S. adults and 81.9% of children were now wireless-only, according to the CDC’s National Health Interview Survey. That doesn’t run counter to the landline revival; it helps explain it. The renaissance is not infrastructural but behavioral — using a desk phone or even the corded handset as a conscientious off-ramp from the attention economy while you keep getting calls on your number.
Limits and Trade-offs of the Modern Landline Trend
A landline isn’t going to cure each of your digital ills. Many of today’s “landlines” are delivered via broadband and require power, in contrast to older copper lines, which could still work during outages with a corded phone. More importantly, backing off of feeds also might mean you miss some real-time news that social networks generally deliver posthaste. The aim isn’t tech abstinence; it’s control — deliberately creating a new environment designed to shift your attention away from the quick convening power of social media and toward specific content so comprehensive that it will also pull you in.
Experts also warn against moral panics. The American Psychological Association states that it’s how we use technology, rather than whether we use it, that matters most. Ofcom, the U.K. communications regulator, for example, also finds increasing demand for tools and behaviors to help people manage time online — not delete it entirely. The smartest move is to reinvent the environment so that the healthy choice is also easy.
How to Try It Without Going Fully Off-Grid
Park your smartphone in another room and forward calls to a paired desk phone or a real landline. If you can, use as simple a corded handset as you can; the tactile ritual — pick up-dial-hang up — helps bookend calls. Use Do Not Disturb with a brief “Allowed Contacts” list so crucial people can still reach you.
Set up “voice windows” in which you’d otherwise check in by text. You will turn multi-paragraph message threads into five-minute calls and wipe away the micro-distractions that compound into burnout. If you must have voicemail, send it to email or a second device in order to avoid unlocking the main screen when retrieving messages.
At the very least, treat it as a boundary object rather than something to collect. Its power lies in the elimination of choice architecture that powers doomscrolling. When a phone can do nothing but put two voices together, your brain gets something few connections online allow: attention that comes in one loud, ringing line.