Mind Sprocket: The Back Page : Letters

So it’s becoming clear that our society has moved away from sending physical letters through what the online world as deemed as “snail mail.”

Why send a letter? By the time the mail arrives, what we’ve said, all the latest happenings, could have been said in a phone call, an e-mail, a Facebook message, an instant chat. Do we do those things as often as we should, to replace the letters? Not always.

We’ve lost patience. We want that instant gratification. We want a reply in the next hour. We want to know our effort to communicate has an incentive. We won’t do anything without knowing the reward.

If we don’t think someone will respond, why send a letter?

We want control over the consequences of our actions. We don’t want the Postal Service to lose our mail. In an e-mail, it’s usually only lost because we’ve entered the wrong address.

What do we lose? Personal touch, for one. An e-mail doesn’t archive someone’s handwriting, an extension of one’s personality. Everyone’s typing looks the same. Sure, whatever mode of technology we use to communicate has a time stamp. But in this way, nothing shows its age without an electronic time stamp. Everything looks the same. Perhaps its just the illusion we want, that nothing grows old, that time doesn’t move. We want everyone to look the same until all the lines are blurred and we don’t even know who or where we are.

So write a letter. Take 10 minutes to write someone you don’t speak to often. Or even someone you talk to daily. Consider this a creative exercise, or a thoughtful action. You can smile knowing this person will finally receive a piece of decent mail between all the junk and bills for once.