Letter Writing for Resilience
We need to relearn how to not know
Last month, I mailed a letter to a friend in England. After taking six months to respond to their email, I thought snail mail would be a more delightful way to manage my delayed correspondence.
Who doesn’t love mail? The perfect little treat, especially for folks like me who are overly tech’d and constantly trying to run away from it1.
So I went to Goods for the Study and got beautiful, soft grey paper and envelopes from Original Crown Mill2, pulled out my fountain pen, filled it with a mesmerizing Earl Grey ink3, cramped the fuck out of my hand writing my little heart out, and stuck it in the mail.
And I haven’t heard back.
Did it not arrive?
Is it lost?
Is my penpal simply taking their sweet time in replying?
Do they think I didn’t write—a reasonable conclusion considering how bad I am at email when no one is paying me to do it?!?!?!?
I have no way of knowing.
Every time I think of The Letter™️, I anxiously run through the list of possible mishaps and debate whether or not I should email my friend.
“Did you get my letter?” I draft plaintively. “No worries if not or if you just haven’t responded yet I was just wondering thanks!”
‘Twas not so long ago that not knowing was the norm. You would mail a letter, hope someone got it, and that’s it. When reading older novels or books of collected letters, this becomes starkly clear: the letter writers stress about whether the letters are crossing in the mail, or if one has gotten lost, or if they are being ghosted.
Today, we operate under the assumption that our technology delivers what we send unless told otherwise. In the absence of the email bounce back, the “did not deliver” text alert, the “no signal,” we have a level of certainty that the message was received and, if it has not been responded to, that’s a choice4.
I was raised in a thank you note household. For every gift, a thank you note. I spent years trying to avoid this responsibility, but now I love it. Thank you notes for dinner. Thank you notes for gifts. Thank you notes anytime!
The primary recipient of my thank you notes are members of my family, who send me birthday and Christmas gifts each year (thanks!). About five years ago, I noticed that while I had greatly improved my thank you note turnaround time, there was an anxiety emerging in the recipients.
“Your grandmother wants to know if you got her card?”
Even our elders and their proxies can‘t wait for a thank you note to arrive, and I now often send a text or email and a physical note. Time has sped up, and any delay is a potential problem.
What have we lost with the collapse of that interstitial time? With tracking of every delivery, of every move, of our friends and lovers? What have we lost without waiting?
Not knowing is normal. Still, even now, in our hyperconnected age. We don’t know the future. We don’t know when we will die. We don’t know what others are thinking. We just…don’t know.
Maybe physical mail, snail mail, so slow “will it even show” letters are a way to build some resilience in the face of the unknown.
The more we hand over our agency to tools for the sake of perceived productivity gains, the more we lose our ability to accept the core state of our existence: uncertainty.
I still don’t know if my friend got my letter. I don’t want to know5.
There is only one option, really: write them again.
🎁 Sharing
My friend Sibi has launched a bold building-in-public journey called $1M year where you can watch three dads turn $60k into a $1 million business in a year.
The People’s Forum has great free political education programs that you can catch in-person but also online and on replay.
It’s very rare that I purchase a consumer good and it actually improves my life, but I recently got a portable chargeable heating pad for cramps and, uh, this is the future we were promised. There are a million on That Site and they’re still cheap6.
I’m almost done reading Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence by Dan McQuillan and I highly recommend it. McQuillan is a lecturer in Creative and Social Computing and has a PhD in physics: he can explain the tech, but marries it with an astute yet accessible analysis of the social impacts of generative AI. Extremely readable with strong examples of the ways AI and machine learning are already causing harm to our most vulnerable neighbors.
Reading between sets is praxis DID YOU KNOW YOU CAN REQUEST THAT YOUR LIBRARY BUYS BOOKS AND THE LIBRARY WILL BUY THEM? Seeding the Queens Public Library with tech critical and leftist books is my current small action in this moment. I’m about to be unemployed7 and am uh broke so this behavior is selfish and benefits others. True mutual aid. I recommend it. It’s easy, it’s free to you, and it means that when someone searches “AI” at QPL the book above will appear.
🔎 Seeking
Like personals, but for information, via the original algorithm: the human mind. Have something you’re seeking? Know about the thing someone else is seeking? Reply to this email or comment and I'll include it—at my discretion, I do not trust all of you—in the next newsletter.
ISO French-language small and indie magazines that will deliver to the U.S.! My love of print media has not died, and I want some lefty artsy fashiony weird or even just NYRB-level French mags in my house.
How can we tell if an app is using AI if it’s not clearly disclosed? For example, spellcheck and grammar check long predates AI...but now it seems like a lot of these spelling/grammar things are AI-ing? Intentional use is not the same as unintentional use and this seeker cares about the difference!
Plant nerds, we need an I.D.: is this a Chinese privet tree? Opposing, four petal white flowers. Invasive in the southeast? Should it be destroyed 🔪 🌳?
Life? Or death? This tree/shrub/thing’s survival is in your hands, readers.
And with that, we’re SO back! Thanks for reading. Think Piece will continue to explore the intersection of business, culture, knowledge work, and thank you notes for resilience.
Share this with a friend—especially if they can help our seekers.
Girls will literally close their startups instead of staying on social media. It me. I’m girls.
Have you tried to find letter-writing paper recently? It’s hard! You can get notecards, but just…paper…for letters…nope.
I really love a tonal ink/paper moment. Grey on grey, or green ink with a green-bordered card, so simple so chic.
Ouch
If you’re reading this, don’t tell me!
Are we tariff-ing? I have no idea what’s going on anymore.
I’m going back to school—more on that later and am about to be the proud owner of many, many, many thousands in student loans with zero income for the next year. Yay.
Re: evil plant, yes, I think that is privet! There is a ton around here (Nashville) and it's considered very invasive but it DOES have a beautiful jasmine-like scent that I personally love. I say trim a ton of it to put in your house while it's in bloom and remove the rest. More here: https://www.nashvilletreeconservationcorps.org/treenews/chinese-privet-the-history-of-this-invasive-plant-and-the-problems-it-creates
I have an old soul despite being in my thirties. I still write postcards to friends and family whenever I go travelling. I had to stop myself to ask whether they received my post card or not. Once in a while, I can see my postcard when I visit my parents or my friend. Delayed gratification at its finest.