When’s the last time you received or wrote a personal letter?

Project Mayhem

Project Mayhem

Experienced
So I wanted to do something for my father in law who’s retired RAAF. I asked him to provide me a list of every airframe he had ever flown in (59!). About a month goes by and then I receive a letter from him...and it dawns on me that I can’t remember the last time I received or wrote a letter. It really is a lost art, and certainly has a different impact than an email or text.

So I decided I was going to write my family and friends just at random and invite them to lunch or dinner etc...and the deal was they have to respond in the same manner. Here’s a fun social exercise for you...ask a friend for their actual mailing address and watch how they react.

So my question is, is this unique to me... or does this still exist outside of my experience?

Was thinking about Unix-guys excellent point about remembering to let those you care about know how you feel...and what would be the most impactful way of doing that? It seems a hand written letter has a lot of merit. When we all are gone... will those who knew us cherish texts, emails and selfies? When my father in law is no longer here I will still have his letter, in his unique hand, that is tangible... and I know that will mean more to me than a collection of 14pt arial on a server somewhere.
 
funny juxtaposition, but i know there are online services that help match people up to be penpals, using real paper and ink, and mailing letters to each other.

it's definitely a thing.
 
Haven't written a letter since the 90's, and guess what, I don't miss it one damn bit. More power to ya if you want to do it, but it was nice when there was no alternative. Especially the fun part of deciphering other people's handwriting. Or the part where you ran out of paper, or got cramp from writing. I don't miss those things at all.
 
Project Mayhem said:
So I wanted to do something for my father in law who’s retired RAAF. I asked him to provide me a list of every airframe he had ever flown in (59!). About a month goes by and then I receive a letter from him...and it dawns on me that I can’t remember the last time I received or wrote a letter. It really is a lost art, and certainly has a different impact than an email or text.

So I decided I was going to write my family and friends just at random and invite them to lunch or dinner etc...and the deal was they have to respond in the same manner. Here’s a fun social exercise for you...ask a friend for their actual mailing address and watch how they react.

So my question is, is this unique to me... or does this still exist outside of my experience?

Was thinking about Unix-guys excellent point about remembering to let those you care about know how you feel...and what would be the most impactful way of doing that? It seems a hand written letter has a lot of merit. When we all are gone... will those who knew us cherish texts, emails and selfies? When my father in law is no longer here I will still have his letter, in his unique hand, that is tangible... and I know that will mean more to me than a collection of 14pt arial on a server somewhere.
Click to expand...

Great and inspiring story.
 
Project Mayhem said:
When we all are gone... will those who knew us cherish texts, emails and selfies?
Click to expand...
I have frequently thought the same about digital pictures vs actual paper photos.

But this applies even more in your example.

Writing a thank you note is about the longest hand-written thing I've done in many years.
 
chris said:
funny juxtaposition, but i know there are online services that help match people up to be penpals, using real paper and ink, and mailing letters to each other.

it's definitely a thing.
Click to expand...

Didn't that snag Charles Mansion a wife? :)
 
Written literature of all kinds is in danger of extinction. I do hvac maintenance for a county library that has 6 locations. There are many less books than used to be. Most people come there to use the computer and rent free movies.
I worry about what may eventually be lost for future generations of kids. Heck, just look at how fuzzy our past is..... how were those big stone structures built?
 
My mom is turning 96 in a few months, after surviving a bad cancer scare almost 40 years ago. She hasn't been able to hear well enough to talk on the phone for many years, and now has too hard a hard time handling the technical side of email as well, so we have been strictly limited to written communication for a while. Like many folks of her generation, she still writes exclusively in cursive, which has gotten a little harder for me to decipher over the years! I don't hand-write my replies though, as I can make my writing a lot more legible for her if I create it on the computer and then print it out in a larger font.

But she absolutely loves receiving the physical letters, either from my wife or myself, and will re-read each of them many, many times in the weeks after receiving them.

It's a lost art. I used to spend weeks crafting and revising long letters to remote friends, back in the eighties. Long-form communication, which could at times easily diverge off into literature or poetry...it was not a rigidly constrained format, least of all by time. There are things I miss about that era before computers became ubiquitous. Writing to my mom reminds me of those days.
 
My second year of college, my then girlfriend (now wife!) used to write letters to each other several times a week. We still have them and I amazed that we sent down and handwrote multiple pages on a regular basis. That was well over 20 years ago and probably the last time I wrote a letter, though I still write thank you notes and have passed that on to my kid. Getting a letter in the mail was magical!
 
Actually, it just occurred to me that the last letter I received was almost certainly from my mother-in-law... She would write nice letters inside birthday cards or "holiday" cards. :(
 
NeoSound said:
Written literature of all kinds is in danger of extinction. I do hvac maintenance for a county library that has 6 locations. There are many less books than used to be. Most people come there to use the computer and rent free movies.
I worry about what may eventually be lost for future generations of kids. Heck, just look at how fuzzy our past is..... how were those big stone structures built?
Click to expand...

The main library of the university where I work used to have a giant bibliography catalog room when I studied there in the 90's. All computers and comfy sofa's to sit with laptops now. Same with the giant reading room, although half of the books are still there. It's the way of things though. In the end books are not an end in itself, written letters are not an end in itself, they are the means to an end, transmit information from one person to another. You don't need a physical object to do that, databases can do that infinitely better. I'll take wikipedia any time over the old always out of date encyclopedias that every family used to have.

Will the personal touch and feel get lost from books and written letters? Undoubtedly. But then again things are always in flux, stability is an illusion and our lives dance upon a knife's edge. How many of us remember that you could still connect to a physical operator when making a phonecall who patched things through? There's whole series of categories of jobs and practices that have disappeared with the passing of time. New ones come, old ones go. I'm sure young people are already bewildered when watching old movies and TV series whose stories deal with confusing of people missing each other, or being out of touch, all stuff that today is easily fixed with a mobile phone call or sending a text. And I'm not even talking about black and white stuff. Something even as recent as Friends of Buffy has episodes that could have easily resolved with a single text of phonecalls.
 
I like to send handwritten letters with my insurance payment checks just to nerve them and becoz i' m too lazy to put on a PC, open Office, write on a keyboard, print sign and scan....sometimes computers just make you loose time. Keep things simple. Howbeit, the last letter I received, except post cards, must have been from my late mother in 2008, before she passed away in 2009; a generation part for which the internet and computers were just a loss off time and a lot of headache. I'm still not sure they were wrong. All this digital stuff, except for document management (a 35 MEUR project just fits in one hard drive compared to 100sqm of document cubicles), did it really make us win that much time ?
 
I still always send handwritten thank you letters with a personal note in each. I think people are pretty surprised by it - and I have sometimes received thank you cards for my thank you card.. hahaha
 
Jimmytwotimes said:
I still always send handwritten thank you letters with a personal note in each. I think people are pretty surprised by it - and I have sometimes received thank you cards for my thank you card.. hahaha
Click to expand...

I do this too. Even to people like receptionists at doctors and dentists offices. And I have reaped the benefits from doing so as they most definitely remember me amongst the hundreds of people they see and go the extra mile to help me out when needed due to that personal touch.
 
Muad'zin said:
I'm sure young people are already bewildered when watching old movies and TV series whose stories deal with confusing of people missing each other, or being out of touch, all stuff that today is easily fixed with a mobile phone call or sending a text. And I'm not even talking about black and white stuff. Something even as recent as Friends of Buffy has episodes that could have easily resolved with a single text of phonecalls.
Click to expand...
Same with the concept of "synchronize your watches" ;-)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom