When I gave up my social media, I fell back on email and texting as a way to stay in touch with people. But now, ten months on, I'm finding that texting and email are just so troublesome.
There's been no drama (quite the opposite, it's been lovely) but the physical act of hunching over my phone or sitting at my computer has started to feel like work.
This is a good thing, I think. I want to believe it means my brain is learning to see technology as tool rather than as interface for living. It feels like the right direction for me. That said, I now feel bad that I told my social media friends to text and email me instead, only to now have their emails put me in such an ambivalent mood.
But what's rather nice is that one of these friends has now become a snail mail penpal. I read their letter over lunch the other day, along with two other letters received from snail mail penpals.
These other pals? One was a friend I met for the first time earlier this year after we got to know each other on birbsite and later over text.
Related: When online friendship transcends social media
The other I have known for almost 24 years and we have never met. We don't plan to meet either, because we have sustained such a long and mutually supportive friendship just through handwritten mail and the occasional text exchange. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to meet them, but we feel no pressure as it would be superfluous. They are one of my oldest, dearest friends, perhaps because of distance. We could always be ourselves with each other since the trappings, obligations, and weird social norms of more frequent contact has never gotten in the way.
It appears there is something deeply connective about slow physical correspondence when we hold space for it, for the people we correspond with, in our lives. I understand "connection" has a bad taste about it these days because of social media, but I still believe in the old context of connection. Where it's about relating, understanding, sharing, and appreciating a fellow human's experience.
And look, I love my mechanical keyboard. I'm not ashamed to admit that what got me into computers (and then computer science and then a tech-related career) was the physical sensation of typing. My fingers and thumbs love the dance. My body loves the flow. I have lived decades enjoying that feeling, maybe even enough to overlook some things less lovely in pursuit of it, like glass keypads and lit-faced hunching.
Letter, though... the slowness, the lack of pressure... although sometimes people do pressure themselves to do stuff like send gifts when it really in't necessary.
The letter, the love that goes into it, is the only thing that matters.
It's a gift, a reminder that a human somewhere in the world is thinking of you, that you matter enough for them to make time to choose paper, to sit and write, to go to the office and pay for a stamp.
Snail mail technology has come full circle. Once it was letters from people. And then it was way too many meaningless letters from businesses. Now businesses are going digital, and so there’s an acceptable signal-to-noise ratio in my mailbox again.
Well, I better go write some replies.
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