The genre mocking the outdated habits boomers insist on keeping assumes newer is always better, but several of the mocked habits hold up under research: the phone call builds more connection than the text, and writing notes by hand can beat typing them

The list of outdated habits that baby boomers insist on keeping is a dependable crowd-pleaser: the phone call where a text would do, the handwritten note, the paper map, the refusal to conduct their entire lives through a screen. The joke rests on a premise that is rarely examined, which is that newer is simply better, so holding on to the old way must be inertia or stubbornness. It is worth testing that premise against a couple of the specific habits, because when you actually do, the mockery turns out to have the direction of travel backwards more often than it comfortably should.

The phone call is quietly winning

Start with the most mocked habit of all: ringing someone instead of texting. The psychologists Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley had people reconnect with an old friend either by voice or in writing, after first asking them to predict how each would feel. People expected the call to be more awkward, and that expectation is precisely the fear that nudges all of us toward the safety of text. They were wrong. The voice conversation left people feeling significantly more connected than the written one, and with no more awkwardness at all. Hearing another person’s actual voice did something that typed words could not, and, tellingly, video added nothing measurable beyond what the audio already delivered.

So the person who insists on calling is not clinging to an inferior tool out of habit. They are, on the evidence, choosing the medium that reliably builds a stronger bond, while the rest of us avoid it over an awkwardness that largely fails to materialise. The mockery has the situation exactly inverted: the caller is doing connection well, and the reflexive texter is the one leaving something on the table.

The handwritten note holds up too

Take a second example, writing things down by hand. In a much-cited 2014 study in Psychological Science, Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer had students take lecture notes either in longhand or on a laptop, with the internet disabled so that distraction could not be the explanation, and then tested how well they had understood the material. The longhand group did better on the conceptual questions. The reason is the interesting part. Laptop users tended to transcribe the lecture almost word for word, whereas writing by hand is slow enough that you are forced to summarise and reframe in your own words, which is exactly the mental effort that produces real understanding rather than a verbatim record.

Honesty requires a caveat, because this is one of the findings the replication movement has since prodded, and a later meta-analysis found the longhand advantage small and not statistically reliable. So the case here is suggestive rather than settled. But even a contested draw is a long way from the confident assumption that the notebook is obsolete. The habit is at worst no worse, and quite possibly better, than the device that replaced it.

“Outdated” is a claim, not a fact

Put these together and a pattern shows through. What gets filed under outdated habits is frequently a practice whose actual value the newer default quietly discarded, without anyone stopping to check. The call was displaced by the text because the text is convenient, not because it connects better. The notebook gave way to the laptop because the laptop is faster, not because it teaches better. Convenience and speed are genuine advantages, and often decisive ones, but they are not the same thing as superiority, and this genre keeps quietly conflating the two.

Calling a habit outdated is a claim about value, and value is something you can actually test rather than assume. When people bother to test it, the older habit survives surprisingly often, which suggests that the word outdated is doing less descriptive work than it pretends. A good deal of the time it simply means unfamiliar to the young, which is a fact about the observer, not the habit.

What the evidence does and does not settle

None of this is a case that older is always better, which would just be the same lazy assumption running in reverse. Plenty of habits genuinely have been superseded, and every generation, including the ones doing the mocking, holds defaults that the next will rightly keep and others it will rightly drop. The phone-call studies describe averages, and some exchanges really are better left as texts. The handwriting effect is contested and drawn largely from Western student samples. What the evidence supports is not reverence for the old ways but something more modest and more useful: the willingness to ask, of any specific habit, whether the newer version is actually better or merely newer.

It is also worth naming the thing underneath the joke. Singling out one generation to laugh at for keeping practices that, in several cases, the research quietly endorses is ageism with a smartphone in its hand. The people who insist on the call and the notebook are not automatically behind. Sometimes they simply never stopped doing the thing that worked, while everyone else swapped it for the thing that was easier and assumed, without checking, that easier and better were the same word.