These days, we are more used to picking up the phone for practical reasons: all the fiddly, joyless drudgery that falls under the heading of ‘life admin’. We hear, “Press one to report a lost or stolen card” or “You can also pay your council tax online at www dot…”, far more often than we hear, “Oh my god, let me tell you about what happened!” or “I love you”.

Even with the advent of FaceTime and Skype, we still default to communicating with the written word. WhatsApp has 1.5 billion users worldwide, with 65 billion messages being sent every day. In the first quarter of this year, 2.38 billion people used Facebook in some way. It’s estimated by business intelligence company Domo that around 8 trillion texts are sent every year.

We’ve gone off phone calls. We swerve answering when it’s an unknown number. Memes about hating talking on the phone abound. But it wasn’t always this way. Don’t you remember spending hours talking to your friends as a teenager, sat at home on a landline? Or, slightly later, gradually loosening your grip on your mobile as you fell asleep listening to the voice of the person you loved. We romanticise getting proper letters in pen and ink, but we’ve forgotten the pleasure and sense of connection we get from hearing someone’s voice.

Outdated and awkward, or good for our health? Speaking on the phone could make us happier