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I am from the era of the beginning of emails. I wrote a couple of letters, but most of it was emails.
So I'm more impacted by the next thing. Going from email to chat. And I think it is absolutely horrible. Before, it used to be that one thoughtfully wrote down and email and sent it out. Now I am part of 2432 Slack channels in which each message can become its own thread and I (I wanted to capitalize it to emphasize that it is me, but it already is) am responsible for filtering out what is important to me.
When I dealt with emails I would get emails that weren't meant for me, but it was a whole different level of volume.
I find that for me, it’s the opposite. It’s very fast to scan a Slack channel and only dig into interesting threads. But I get CC’d on endless emails that aren’t meant for me, to the tune of dozens per day. And I don’t have any way to unsubscribe — I can mute a thread or a whole channel in Slack, but there’s no equivalent once I’m CC’d.
Thunderbird can do this, although I haven't used it myself.
(And I realize not many people use Thunderbird for work.)
And there is always at least one person in email chain who puts their signature with company logo, custom fonts and colors to every single reply, making it annoying to try follow the conversation because my email client can't even parse the mess anymore.
If you use Gmail, press m to mute a thread. That's the equivalent.
It's a godsend, I can't imagine an e-mail client without it.
Sounds like you need an old school email client. May I suggest gnus?
For some reason the most annoying discussions I am in are not in channels but in "group direct messages". Lots of them have 5+ people and spam discussions that are completely unrelated to me. There is no leave button. Muting is problematic because they have no topic and in 2 months if the same person wants to message a group of people, it will reuse the same group DM for a different message (eg. one month it's about if we have pictures of dogs to share for the internal blog and the next it's info about something urgent from HR).
> for filtering out what is important to me.
I see it going the way of the email: we have these optimistic "inbox 0" kind of veleity, but after a week most people understand their life will be eaten by email at that pace and just accept an overflowing inbox where they'll willfully ignore 99.9%, including legit communication if it doesn't hit the appropriate filter.
Ignoring 99.9% of what's happening in all the dozens of Slack channels is probably the way: if there was anything important it's up to the sender to make it clear and reach it's audience. That might not be the ideal way, but the reverse just won't work anyway.
I like Slack because you are not responsible for any single message unless you are specifically called out in it. Emails were each little todos that sat in your inbox until you addressed them.
If you are feeling good you can engage in a spirited thread about some issue, but if you are having an off day you can just give it a quick read and move on.
It's kind of the same issue that happened when everyone moved from forums to social media
At my last job I simply refused to go onto Slack, and I had an argument/gripe prepared whenever I was asked. Be nice about it, sound sensible about it, you might get away with it. Distraction is the enemy, Flow is the friend.
At the beginning of my career, I wrote emails. Nobody read them. I stopped.
I still write paper letters — about at the same rate as I write long epistolary emails, which is to say, more than monthly, but less than weekly.
People (in my friend circle anyway) really love to get paper letters. Precisely because they are now so rare. And because (I think) they carry the trace of someone's voice and concentrated thought in such a particular way. Some people write back more than others — I don't stress about that too much.
I guess my point is — you don't have to abandon something good just because most people do.
Fellow letter-writers unite! Similar experiences, I've had the same positive feedback, and for some it's the first (only?) personal letter that they've ever received.
I loathed writing "thank you cards" for birthday gifts received, but in retrospect it was helpful and healthy to practice the process. Once you've written a few dozen, it gets easier.
Tips:
Make a list of your "ride or die" friends (paper, notecard, text file, todo app, whatever).
Make sure you have their addresses handy (ie: iOS contacts app).
Don't get hung up on special paper or pens (until you like doing it, and it becomes a hobby).
Keep a book/pad/clipboard/paperclip with: list, stamps, paper/pen.
I've printed off a "guidelines" sheet where I can put copy paper on top of it, but see through some thick black lines which keeps my writing mostly straight.
For the truly advanced: "Rolodex of pre-addressed envelopes"... either hand-addressed, printed, labels... who knows. I'm not there yet, but I've often gotten hung up where I write but don't send a letter for weeks/months because honestly it's easy to get distracted and there's generally no urgency to the letter/message.
...then just make it a goal to get through that list at least once per year. I'll often include a picture of the kiddos, or a travel photo, or best case would be a picture of time spent with them.
Universally appreciated, often un-reciprocated, but like you: don't stress much about it. People are busy, but it doesn't mean you can't do your part.
> And because (I think) they carry the trace of someone's voice and concentrated thought in such a particular way.
I agree wholeheartedly.
I was raised mormon and did my mormon mission 2007-2009 in Ukraine. We were not allowed to call anyone outside our family on christmas and mothers day, and we were limited to 1 hour a week for email, family only. We were allowed to write handwritten letters to anyone, so that's how I maintained my relationship to my then friend now spouse, about 2-3 times a month as our sole form of communication.
There are some very nice things about writing letters, but ultimately it makes communication more difficult compared to more modern options, and my experience letter writing left me much more appreciative of the alternatives we enjoy today.
Wow that’s a lot of restrictions on your communications. Restricting people’s communication and separating them friends and family is what cults often do. Was there a good reason for this? Like cost of international calls in the 2000s?
Asking sincerely.
I think hand writing is still very important, but for entirely personal (and maybe selfish) reasons. One of the biggest motivators for me to learn new language scripts has been the joy in producing letters in a foreign script using my own hand. Handwriting has a deep link within the mind to a number of important language areas, and is probably wired through completely different pathways than keyboard typing. Not to say one is better than the other, ultimately it’s all about communication. But just like some people prefer to draw by hand, I still prefer taking notes and writing my thoughts down by hand first.
Arcade Fire did a good job capturing this wistfulness in "We Used to Wait" from 2010. Recommended: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rs11Bp1RkpU
Thanks for that reminder.
Waiting has the side effect of making the perception of time go by slower.
I remember how when first taking digital photos around 2010 I noticed that I remembered very little and time seemed to fly by because I was looking at a screen the whole time (on the back of a camera).
And today we're all looking at bigger screens all the time in every place and have more photos than ever. And time seems to go by faster.
That, as well age. That does it too.
They also made a cool website where you could type in your address and it would use Google Satellite and Street View images to make a personal music video. HN discussion from when it came out:
and to ironically bring it back around to tech, there was this Chrome Experiment that's totally worth trying on a desktop/laptop browser and is centered around that song. (it's from before https everywhere, but safe, also enable popups)
http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/
Because the chrome experiment was my first exposure to the song, I'll occasionally find myself walking home in the middle of the night, and will play the song on my phone speaker.
I built (but never released) a project for this: an end-to-end encrypted "slow" chat app, where you'd send long-form rich-text letters to friends and they'd take a configurable amount of time to deliver, backed either just by client business logic or optionally with timelock encryption (this one [1], not this one [2]).
I've been meaning to clean it up and open source it.
There is an app called Slowly [0] that kind of does that, you send open letters and people can respond to you. They take time to arrive, the longer you physically are from each other, the longer they take.
I've found it very cool, got a few responses to my open letter and responded to some letters. People were cool and writing long form stuff is great. Unfortunately I struggle to have a long term relationship through this, I feel too shallow. But the experience has been great.
I travel extensively. I write postcards from every new location to my family. I often have to purchase postage stamps and postcards at airports because finding them outside of the airport is surprisingly hard.
It warms my heart when I get back and my grandchildren show them off to me.
I suggest you start this tradition if you travel often.
I’m old enough to have written letters before email was available. Even so, the combination of having first gotten a computer at the same time as when school started expecting lots of written work and the ensuing proliferation of computers has meant my typing speed and written thoughts work at comparable speeds.
I am a physically slow writer and haven’t spent enough time doing that to align that pace with the rate thoughts come to mind when writing by hand. I do have friends with whom our email exchanges are like letters in terms of length, thoroughness, and being text-only. At random times I send a reply by postal mail instead of email. Maybe I do this a half dozen times or so per year.
I do write the letter on a computer before writing it out by hand. That’s because of the aforementioned thinking rate-to-writing rate being so far apart. Of course it takes extra time on my end, but I appreciate how I see my thinking differently when re-writing it by hand. And everyone I know enjoys getting a letter (or even a postcard) in the mail. People find pleasure in personal mail showing up, rather than bills and unsolicited stuff, and there’s an ineffable, intimate pleasure in holding and reading the handwriting of someone you know.
There are a number of things like this I periodically do, trying to be a little more analog. Maybe analog is better, I’m not really out to propose or determine that. At the least, these acts bring a pleasant disruption, typically for sender and recipient, just because they’re outside what we’re accustomed to experiencing.
FWIW, many sleep away camps still rely on letter writing. My daughter left with a stack of pre-stamped envelopes and a pad of paper. She enjoyed writing and receiving letters.
It's interesting, because I just finished viewing her, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a lonely fellow who makes his living writing letters. Theodore Twombly writes letters on the behalf of clients. He writes heartfelt love letters, letters from daughter to father, letters to bridge the distance for friends.
And of course, the premise of the film is that he installs an AI OS and falls in love with the disembodied Assistant voice, Samantha. And [spoiler alert], Samantha's parting gift to Theodore is that she arranges to have his letters published as a bona fide book by a real book publisher, because this is the best way she found to honor him and his work. It's really touching that this ephemeral AI without a body should reach into the physical world that Theodore inhabits in this way.
I haven't seen it, but everything about that movie sounds completely unrealistic, like some sort of alternate-reality sci-fi.
Dear HN,
I hope this letter finds you well. I find myself, at present, in Dyer, Indiana.
What a glorious journey we had, conveyed in a wonderful horseless carriage. We made a drive of 5 miles in less than half an hours time! The wonders of Ford's machine continue to amaze me. What a wonderful time to be alive.
I look forward to your most gracious reply. Yours truly,
--Mike--I recently went on a business trip and decided to see if sending a postcard in 2024 was still possible. To my surprise, it is! Gas stations still sell postcards, and Walmart has stamps. However, when I handed my postcards to the young hotel employee, I worried she might not know what to do with them and might even discard them. It took almost a week for them to arrive, but it turns out postcards are still a thing in 2024. :-)
Why would you be surprised that sending postcards is still possible?
In my experience, hotels and convenience stores also sell stamps, sometimes called "seals" (at least in Singapore).
Yes, can letters bring an intimacy that you miss with emails. Plus as you age, you can look back at letters you saved to bring that time back to life. You see the person's hand writing and whatever was put on the envelope for delivery.
Plus back then, kids would get very excited when a letter came for them and would look forward to getting the next one. email is way to instant.
Also far more thought when into writing letters than an email.
For what it's worth, my children write letters. And by "write letters," I mean "produce artifacts filled with a combination of mediums: words, paint, markers, stamps, cut-outs, quotes, etc." They understand conveyance better than I ever have, despite being a professional information-handler. I think letters are both more and less than described here.
I think I've lost access to the love notes I exchanged with someone recently, because they were Discord messages and not emails, and they've blocked me and I closed the DM trying not to look at it.
Sure most of it was me spiraling out of control but maybe there was some useful red flag I could have dug out of our conversations, even if it was my own.
They blocked you which is a red flag.
Even emails, the modern letter, now feel like they're becoming a relic. My younger peers avoid it as much as possible, and instead prefer chat tools. I wonder what would be most to future historians examining us, that current historians have the advantage of.
I used to manage a team of 12 young interns and graduates. They almost all hated emails and hated making calls. They would always default to messaging/Teams/etc. I spent a lot of time coaching people on how to make calls, why etc. It was a construction adjacent industry and sometimes it HAS To be a phonecall.
Something else that's lost when we stopped writing letters: attention span. When someone is reading a letter it is almost always the only thing they are doing.
If we're talking about handwritten letters or even typewritten, one would have to have a plan for what they wanted to say and then execute their writing linearly from beginning to end, whereas now we can edit and poke and prod and reword with almost no effort.
Used to write quite a few letters, used to draft then rewrite them using a nice pen and good ink. I miss doing it, very short on the time to write them now. I also found out I lost a lot of letters a last year while moving which was heartbreaking
Also, stamp collecting is almost dead (in the West anyway).
Although it isn't just the lack of mail that did that, it was also countries putting out huge numbers of stamps to milk the collectors for money.
I think it's equally the reduction of personal letters. Businesses haven't used stamps for decades, so I receive perhaps two letters per year with a stamp.
A few years ago someone asked for my address (!) and then sent a wedding invitation, but more recently there's been the same formality applied to asking for my email address to send a wedding invitation.
We lost nothing. In old London you could write a letter and send it in the AM, to be delivered locally the same day an receive an answer later in the day - not as fast as e-mail. All this built on a class society where the working class got very little and the small gentry class = $$$.
This can not be done now with people, our e-mail enslaved class enables out current e-mail/text/internet/media system
Eugh
Why do they not change the postal system? We know the USPO as well as most other national postal services are on life support. Tied to an inefficient daily postal walk for letters - that never come.
They need to end this and buy off the remaining postal workers.
The remaining system parts, warehouses/trucks/machinery can be sold off if no modus operandi to make a continuing use of the remaining bits of the services? A few registered/certified mail/packages is all that will remain economically viable - if any?
Let it go private and pay off the employees or assess each employee to see if a remaining service can be mounted with the bits remaining?
Many European countries have partly or fully privatized their postal services. Where they still have an obligation (and monopoly) on letter delivery, the companies are desperately trying to reduce that obligation as it costs so much — but that's generally up to the government, which may want to retain a letter service.
The parcels business is generally profitable due to online shopping.
A letter sent within Denmark now costs €3.35 for delivery within 5 working days, or €4.70 for next-day delivery. A registered letter or small parcel is €12.86.