While sorting through boxes of stuff that I am intending to either throw away, sell or otherwise get rid of, I came across this stack of old letters. A correspondence with a friend, you might call it.
Looking at these made me think about how there are aspects of our world that are slowly fading away, and soon will be forgotten by passing time.
I think about how I am old enough to have lived at a time in which when you wanted to communicate with somebody else far away, you sat down and wrote them a letter using paper and pen and ink. You put the letter in an envelope, put a stamp on the envelope and dropped it in a mailbox.
This was what I would often do when I wanted to stay in touch with my relatives back in Denmark when we were living in Spain while I was a teenager.
So you sent the letter and perhaps it took 5-7 days to get there. And even if your friend or family member at the other end was very diligent and sat down and wrote a response within a day or two, their letter back to you would take 5-7 days and all in all it was not unusual for the time between sending a letter to somebody and having their response in hand would take two weeks.
Of course the art of letter writing has pretty much disappeared from our world, thanks to e-mail and smartphones and video calls. I know our grandkids have probably never written a letter in their lives; and might be barely aware that anything other than advertising flyers show up in the mailbox.
But it's not only the art of letter writing that is fading from memory it is also living with a sense of anticipation, while you're waiting for that response.
These days communication is instant. You send somebody a message, and in many cases you can actually tell whether they've looked at the message or not, in real time. We live in an instant, always-on world.
That same sense of anticipation was also something we used to experience extensively during the process of "sending away" for things. There was no Amazon same day or next day service. You tore an order form out of a mail order catalog, wrote in what you wanted, enclosed a check, mailed it off to some warehouse or distribution center... and a week to 10 days later (if you were lucky) your product showed up.
I suppose it would be an exaggeration to say that it felt a bit like Christmas... but you certainly got to anticipate; you had something to look forward to. In a sense — if you want to get into the psychology of it — it was a form of "delayed gratification" that we have almost completely done away with, in our modern world.
Peripherally related, while I definitely read things on the computer, and we have a Kindle, I still really enjoy paper books. There's something very tangible and real about having a paper book that you can carry around with you in your backpack and take out no matter where you are, independent of whether you have Wi-Fi, your gear is charged, or there is cell service... it's always there.
And oddly enough, this very analog way of displaying information sometimes is easier to reference if you need to go back to different places in the text. This held particularly true for me when I was reading self-help books and I would have tiny bookmarks with little notes on them attached to maybe 10-15 pages. Can you do that with an electronic book? Sure you can, but it's just way more cumbersome than to be able to just flip from one spot to another to see where you are and what you're looking for.
I suppose paper books are less likely to disappear off the scene than handwritten letters, but I doubt very many more generations are going to be book collectors.
I'm not so much reflecting on all this from the perspective that we're aging and thinking about "the good old days," so much as from the perspective of what is lost here. Somehow, it feels like something is lost when everything exists only in immediacy with no waiting, no anticipation, and everything exists only in a virtual electronic state as opposed to an actual physical representation.
Which brings me back to that stack of letters from my friend — who has now passed away. Letters represented a physical manifestation of another being another person across distance and time in a way you simply don't have with emails or messages.
Sure, we can look back on somebody's e-mail from when they were still in our lives, but it's still not the same thing as the psysical letter. And if you're an emotional and sentimental sort, you can't exactly put an e-mail under your pillow and sleep with it at night.
Advancement in technology are fine things, and I'm by no means a Luddite... but it's easy to get lost in looking at these advances in technology in terms of the benefits they bring... but we tend to overlook what was lost in the process of advancing. And sometimes what was lost turns out to have unexpected value that is much greater than we originally thought.
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Created at 2025.11.03 23:05 PST
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I like search engines and I know how to ctrl+f in documents, but I also like my old drafting and engineering textbooks with my marginal notes and my highlighted sections from old study sessions. I like kindles/e-readers for their compact storage of entire libraries, but a paper novel is a special experience. I like overnight shipping from Amazon and other online stores, but I also remember waiting for a LEGO catalog order to arrive after the ritual you mentioned of poring through the catalog, filling out an order form, handing my mother some of my allowance, watching her write the check, and then waiting for the box of plastic bricks to arrive.