The Morning: Love letters
Good morning. Letters and phone calls may be archaic, but they have lessons for us on how to be better communicators.
Love lettersA friend told me he recently removed the email app from his phone. “I used to love in the old days, coming home and checking email — there would be new messages!” he rhapsodized. I felt the pang. Not only would there be new messages, but often, in those early days of email, they were actual electronic letters from friends, replete with emotional life updates and unspooling narratives. Before texting, email was an efficient way to communicate, and the way we communicated was in sentences, paragraphs, fully developed thoughts. We hadn’t yet glimpsed the future where “k” or a thumbs-up emoji was considered communication. I’m always excited when people tell me they’ve deleted an app: another tiny reduction in the amount of time those in my orbit will be spending on their phones. Infinitesimal, perhaps, but moving in the right direction. We’re tinkering with these devices that own our attention, we’re taking back a little bit of control. But I’m particularly interested in modifications that can bring back some of the magic of pre-smartphone communication, when letter writing wasn’t quaint and voice mails were miracles. I’ve written about my nostalgia for phone booths, recommending we borrow some of the parameters they provided and bring them into this century (say, containing our private conversations to private spaces). Even if we’re nostalgic for the olden days, it’s hard to reinstitute the old habits. Deleting email from your phone may release you from the compulsion to check it all the time, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to come home to an inbox full of satisfying missives from your friends. Chances are, they’ve been texting you all day, and your inbox is actually full of spam and bills. In an attempt to reduce my phone’s grip on my life, I once suggested to a friend that each time we wanted to send a text to each other, we send a postcard instead. I think we tried this for a week before admitting that it was an inefficient way to chat. I was aware of the art-project nature of the proposition from the outset and didn’t figure our experiment would replace texting, but I hoped that the postcards would be so delightful we’d at least keep a parallel stream of slow communication going. It didn’t happen. A few weeks ago, I placed a phone call to a friend without warning, someone I’d never spoken on the phone with before. It felt a little reckless, a little rude, which made me want to do it even more, because it seems ridiculous that calling someone should be in any way controversial. It should feel wonderful that someone wants to hear your voice, that they were thinking of you and wanted to connect. While I have a few people that I speak to on the phone regularly, most people I consulted view an unbidden phone call as hostile. They assume there’s an emergency if they get a call from someone with whom they don’t have a regular phone relationship. My recent surprise phone call was awkward, as I suspected it might be. People used to have the bandwidth to receive phone calls from anyone at any time, even without caller ID. That skill set has vanished, replaced perhaps by the ability to process multiple group texts blowing up at once. Now, even if it’s someone you are happy to hear from, a surprise call feels a little like someone popping by unannounced in the middle of the night. There are lots of ideas for how to break phone addiction, but not as many for how to regain the romance of what I’m coming to think of as the slow-comms era, the second half of the 20th century when the phone and the mail were our main means of long-distance communication. The ache at the sight of an empty mailbox was, in my memory, more than balanced out by the ecstasy at the letter that finally arrived. It isn’t just the sane cadence of correspondence that we’re missing now, though; it’s the care and attention we gave to it. We sat down and wrote letters and emails. We may have been cooking dinner or folding laundry while we talked on the phone, but we were literally on the hook for the length of the call. Our communication required presence and continued focus on the other person. We can certainly re-establish this kind of concentration with some people — I have a close friend who detests texting, and he’d be thrilled if I dispensed with it in favor of phone calls — but it’s just too efficient to abandon altogether. A more conceivable option is to try to bring the kind of steady presence and full attention I miss to in-person conversations. If the bulk of our remote communication is destined to be mediated by technology, then let’s see how irrelevant we can make our phones when we’re actually together. Turn off alerts, turn off the damn things altogether, and practice really being there. We think we’re naturals at eye contact, at listening before formulating a response, at sitting together in silence. But like phone-call readiness and entertaining voice mail delivery, those skills atrophy too.
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