Stop With the Video Chats Already. Just Make a Voice Call.

Dear colleague and/or friend:

I’d love to do a call about this. And by “call” I mean absolutely NOT a video call. Let’s do a call-call. You know, those old things where we just hear each other’s beautiful voices. Whatever you do, don’t touch that webcam.

Looking forward to (audio) chatting,

Joanna

The time has come to be bold: Stop the nonstop video calling.

Allow me to remind you of the BPE (you know, the Before-Pandemic Era), a time long ago when every call didn’t require colour-coding your bookshelf background, firing up the webcam and staring into a human tic-tac-toe board for hours on end. Video calls used to be a rare treat. Now, they’re everyday soul suckers.

Really. There’s vampirical—I mean, empirical—proof. A high frequency of video calling can cause general, social, emotional, visual and motivational fatigue, researchers at the University of Gothenburg and Stanford University found in a recent study. Even Zoom’s chief executive, Eric Yuan, says he suffers from the dreaded “Zoom Fatigue.”

Look, I’m not saying all video calling must stop. I love video calling. Instantly see and hear people with little to no delay? It’s miraculous. My mom, who is hearing-impaired, struggled throughout my childhood to hear me on the phone. Now, she can see my son wherever she is, and the visual cues help her tremendously.

I’m just saying audio calls can be more productive—and they can sound better than ever.

But how do you know when to pick voice over video? And how do you make it happen without being the meeting jerk who just refuses to turn on the camera? After talking to researchers and technologists—and cutting back on my own video calls—I present you with five steps to regain your sanity.

Step 1: Ask, should this meeting just be an email?

Fact: There are too many meetings. So I beg of you, before deciding on the technological format, simply ask: Do we really need to meet at all?

Step 2: Understand the benefits of audio vs. video

Géraldine Fauville, an assistant professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and the lead researcher on that aforementioned study, mapped out the main reasons video can be so cognitively draining:

• It’s a lot of looking at ourselves, which is unnatural and comes with self-evaluation and scrutiny. Called the mirror effect, this can be particularly intense for women. You can combat this with the self-hide option available in Zoom and Google Meet. Google has just added a number of features to address this specifically. Microsoft Teams’ new Together Mode was built to combat this, too.

• It’s a lot of close-up eye contact. In fact, the brain processes that sort of invasion of space as if it should lead to mating or fighting.

• It’s a lot of sitting and feeling trapped. You can’t get up and walk around during a video call.

• It’s a lot of nodding. “For you to communicate cues to the participant, you need to intensify the cues,” Dr. Fauville said. “So people nod more vigorously than if they were in the same room.”

No wonder we’re exhausted. So yes, limiting the number and length of video calls seems like the obvious answer. And as some of us kick-start the hybrid work life, that will happen naturally.

But voice calls aren’t just table scraps from our work-from-home buffet. They allow you to focus on what’s being said and give you real respite from the screen. I now do my weekly call with my boss on the phone. We reserve video for deeper conversations, like performance reviews.

I also still like to do video calls with colleagues I haven’t caught up with for a while, or for important meetings where reading facial expressions is crucial.

Step 3: Be clear it’s an audio call

You’ve decided that voice is the way to go for a call, now you’ve got to convey that to others.

Don’t waste precious meeting time having an awkward convo about this; be straight up before the call. “Hey, I’d like to do voice—no video—for this call. Work for you?” You can even put it on me: “I read this wonderful column in The Wall Street Journal about how too many video calls are bad.”

In a survey of employees, the University of California, Berkeley, found that 77% multitask during video calls. I called that out in a recent calendar invite: “Let’s do voice-only for this one,” I wrote to my colleagues. “We’re all going to cover each other’s faces with other windows on the screen anyway!” (Yep, we can see all of you, looking over at your second monitor!)

Step 4: Make the call

Even though I made my voice-call preferences known to my colleagues, I’m not just reaching for my phone. In fact, I’ve used all the big videoconferencing services—sans video. Zoom, Google Meet, Slack, FaceTime, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger all produce stable and clear calls if you have a good connection. Most sound better than cellular—especially if you have a good mic. But the best choice is however you can most easily reach your contact.

Slack has become my go-to for work. Since most of the folks already are there all day, it’s great for mimicking the quick desk drop-by. Hit the phone button and it automatically defaults to a voice call. (To add video, you have to tap the video icon.) With Slack audio use surging in the past year, the company has been piloting new group-audio features, an office variation of Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces.

Slack is also looking at ways to improve audio quality and make it easier to switch between desktop and mobile calls, Ali Rayl, the company’s vice president of product and customer experience, told me.

Call-quality-wise, FaceTime audio consistently sounds the best to me. I often talk to my editor via Apple’s service and he sounds crystal clear. The downside? Apple devices only.

Step 5: Try no-video days

“The responsibility of limiting Zoom fatigue is not just on the individuals,” Dr. Fauville told me. “We hope our findings inspire companies to rethink videoconferencing.”

So far, so good. Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser has started “Zoom-free Fridays,” a day free of internal video calls. The University of California, Berkeley, for the past year, has said no recurring meetings—of any kind—on Friday afternoons.

You may want to try a similar policy. Or at the very least start perfecting those extremely polite “You don’t want to see my face and I don’t want to see your face” emails.

Luke Michel has already lived through two technology overhauls in his career, first desktop publishing in the 1980s and online publishing later on. But AI? He’s had enough.

So when his employer, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, made an early-retirement offer to some staff last year, the 68-year-old content strategist decided to speed up his exit. Before, he had expected to work a couple more years.

“The time and energy you have to devote to learning a whole new vocabulary and a whole new skill set, it wasn’t worth it,” he said.

It isn’t that he’s shunning artificial intelligence—he is learning Spanish with the help of Anthropic’s Claude. But, at this point, he’s less than eager to endure all the ways the technology promises to upend work.

“I just want to use it for my own purposes and not someone else’s,” he said.

After rising for decades and then hovering around 40% in the 2010s, the share of Americans over 55 years old in the workforce has slipped to 37.2%, the lowest level in more than 20 years.

The financial cushion of rising home equity and stock-market returns is driving some of the decline, economists and retirement advisers say.

But for some older professionals, money is only part of the equation.

They say they don’t want to spend the last years of their career going through the tumult of AI adoption, which has brought new tools, new expectations and a lot of uncertainty.

Many people retire when key elements of their work lives are disrupted at once, said Robert Laura , co-founder of the Retirement Coaches Association and an expert on the psychology of retirement.

“Maybe their autonomy is being challenged or changed, their friends are leaving the workplace, or they disagree with the company’s direction,” he said.

“When two or three of these things show up, that’s when people start to opt out.”

“AI is a big one,” he adds. “It disrupts their autonomy, their professionalism.”

Michel, whose work required overseeing and strategizing on website content, has been here before.

When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, he was a graphic designer using triangles and rubber cement.

The internet’s arrival changed everything again. Both developments required new skills, and he was energized by the challenge of learning alongside colleagues and peers.

It felt different this time around. “Your battery doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to,” he said.

He would rather spend his energy volunteering, making art, going to operas and chairing the Council on Aging in North Andover, Mass., where he lives.

In an AARP survey last summer of 5,000 people 50 and over, 25% of those who planned to retire sooner than expected counted work stress and burnout as factors.

About half of those retired said they had left work at least partly because they had the financial security to do so.

In general, older Americans are less likely than younger counterparts to use AI, research shows.

About 30% of people from ages 30 to 49 said they used ChatGPT on the job, nearly double the share of those 50 and older, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 adults.

Baby boomers and members of Generation X also experienced the sharpest declines in confidence using AI technology, according to a ManpowerGroup survey of more than 13,900 workers in 19 countries.

“We as employers aren’t doing a good enough job saying (to older workers), we value the skills that you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better,” says Becky Frankiewicz , ManpowerGroup’s chief strategy officer.

Jennifer Kerns’s misgivings about AI contributed to her departure last month from GitHub, where the 60-year-old worked as a program manager.

Coming from a family of artists, she said, it offends her that AI models train on the creative work of people who aren’t compensated for their intellectual property. And she worries about AI’s effect on people’s critical-thinking skills.

So she was dismayed when GitHub, a Microsoft-owned hosting service for software projects, began investing heavily in AI products and expecting employees to incorporate AI into much of their work. In employee-engagement surveys, the company had begun asking them to rate their AI usage on a scale of 1 to 5.

When it came time to write reports and reviews, colleagues would suggest that she use ChatGPT.

“I’d be like, ‘I have no idea how to use that and I have no interest in using AI to write anything for me,’” she said.

It would have been more prudent to work until she was closer to Medicare eligibility, she said. But by waiting until her children were out of college and some of her stock grants had vested, the math worked.

Her first act as a nonworking person: a solo trip to Scotland, where she took a darning workshop and learned how to repair sweaters.

“The opposite of AI,” she said.

Employers already under pressure to cut workers—such as in the tech industry—may welcome some of these retirements, said Gad Levanon , chief economist at Burning Glass Institute, which studies labor-market data.

“The more people retire, the fewer they have to let go,” he said.

Some of the savviest tech users are also balking at sticking around for the AI upheaval. Terry Grimm, who worked in IT for 40 years, retired from his senior software consultant role at 65 last May.

His firm had just been acquired by a bigger firm, which meant learning and integrating the parent company’s AI and other tech tools into his work.

Until then, Grimm expected he might work a couple more years, though he felt that he probably had enough saved to retire.

“I just got to the point where I was spending 40 hours at work and then 20 hours training and studying,” said Grimm, who has since moved with his wife from the Dallas area to a housing development on a golf course in El Dorado, Ark.

“I’m like, ‘I’ll let the younger guys do this.’”