Posted by benbreen 10/23/2024
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.
(And I realize not many people use Thunderbird for work.)
Thunderbird has the Dark Reader addon, which is very nice…
It's a godsend, I can't imagine an e-mail client without it.
But also, it looks like I'd have to do some substantial elisp work to get filtering, etc. working. This is starting to sound like way more work than hitting Ignore on a Slack thread. Maybe it's great once you get it set up, and assuming nobody sends you rich text where you care about the formatting?
It’s as bad as emails.
I hope this is an acceptable compromise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree wholeheartedly.
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.
Asking sincerely.
The biggest reason for this was that the two-year mission is seen as the one window of your life when you dedicate all of your time to serving God. Before that and after that you live normally, but during that window you're as close as the LDS church gets to being part of a religious order of monks. You theoretically chose to go out there (though to be fair there's enough peer and parental pressure for young men that some don't feel there was a choice), and you're with a companion who also chose to serve. The concern was that too much time spent on communicating with and dwelling on home would distract you and your companion from that singular focus and waste the preciously short time that you have before you come home and get caught up in normal life.
Back in the 70s these constraints wouldn't have been a very big deal—most kids living away from home for college would have been in a similar boat, just less structured, and people expected communication across long distances to be slow and sporadic. Few would have paid for weekly long-distance calls in any case. But the church is pretty slow to change, so the rules stuck around longer than was likely healthy even as expectations around communication shifted with the advent of the internet.
At some point in the last 10 years they realized that the slow communication pattern is actually not healthy for kids who grew up with expectations set by smart phones, and the formal restrictions are all but gone from what I understand. We video called with my brother every week in 2017-2019, and many missionaries these days are on Facebook or similar daily.
In the Mormon case, the family is (usually) highly supportive of the mission and our strong members of the church.
So I don't think this really lines up with cult-like behavior as much as it initially seems on the surface.
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.
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've been meaning to clean it up and open source it.
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.
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 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.
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.
Computer screens were downplayed a lot. Theodore did work at a screen to write his letters, although they were ultimately committed to real paper. "Samantha", his AI girlfriend OS, seldom appeared on a screen after her initial setup. He wore an earpiece, and he carried a little "flip box" with a camera in it, so that Samanatha could experience reality while riding in his pocket.
He essentially had full-time two-way verbal contact with Samantha. When he was lying in bed, he would converse with her, and his earpiece was always noticeable. She had no avatar, no image on-screen. (They actually recast "Samantha"'s voice in post-production.)
I think this aniconic treatment was helpful in reinforcing just how unreal Samantha was. She ends up leaving him and disappearing with all the other AIs. Yet, she never had a tangible presence to him at all.
But I believe that it was realistic enough in depicting a parasocial relationship between a fundamentally lonely guy and his "pet AI" system. Surely this sort of thing will happen all the time. It already does. Perhaps the unreal part was how he reverts to tangible human connection for the very ending of the film. Will it last for him?