Post-postal: What did we lose when we stopped writing letters?

Posted by benbreen 10/23/2024

Post-postal: What did we lose when we stopped writing letters?(resobscura.substack.com)

68 points | 73 commentspage 2

mikewarot 10/24/2024|

  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--

julienchastang 10/23/2024||

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. :-)

31carmichael 10/29/2024||

Why would you be surprised that sending postcards is still possible?

meowster 10/24/2024||

In my experience, hotels and convenience stores also sell stamps, sometimes called "seals" (at least in Singapore).

jmclnx 10/23/2024||

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.

IggleSniggle 10/24/2024||

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.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 10/24/2024||

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.

theGnuMe 10/24/2024|

They blocked you which is a red flag.

politelemon 10/23/2024||

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.

10u152 10/23/2024|

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.

carlosjobim 10/24/2024||

There are rational reasons why people hate making and getting phone calls:

– Low audio quality means both participants have to repeat themselves a hundred times during a conversation. Or misunderstand what the other person said.

– Lack of visual connection makes it strange in comparison to talking to somebody in person.

– You will forget important details, with no way to recover them.

– Other people can listen in to the conversation.

– Most phone calls are unwanted, meaning that the phone ring has a negative response instinctively.

As for chat vs e-mail, I don't see any difference. They are in practice the exact same thing. Instant delivery, same method to write a reply, notifications on your device, etc.

10u152 10/24/2024||

You’re mostly quite right about phone calls.

But the point was the industry that I’m in runs on them because the teams you’re communicating with are in the field and supervising construction not in front of a computer.

These are young engineers who need to build experience and relationships with the site teams and text messages aren’t going to build them.

Molitor5901 10/23/2024||

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.

nnf 10/23/2024|

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.

willcipriano 10/23/2024|||

If I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter.

loloquwowndueo 10/23/2024||

“ChatGPT, please summarize this tirade I wrote in less than 500 words”

wruza 10/23/2024|||

Pretty sure they used drafts for that, at least until learning to do it on the fly.

harry_ord 10/24/2024||

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

Jiro 10/24/2024||

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.

Symbiote 10/24/2024|

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.

aurizon 10/23/2024|

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

More comments...