Comment by mysterypie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mysterypie | Hacker News Reader

I’d like to know what the modern substitute is for long personal letters like Feynman’s? It’s not just Feynman; look at this list from the featured website:

> written correspondence includes letters from: Jane Austen, Richard Burton, Helen Keller, Alan Turing, Albus Dumbledore, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry James, Sylvia Plath, John Lennon, Gerald Durrell, Janis Joplin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Hunter S. Thompson, C. G. Jung, Katherine Mansfield, Marge Simpson, David Bowie, Dorothy Parker, Buckminster Fuller, Beatrix Potter, Che Guevara, Evelyn Waugh, Charlotte Brontë.

These are some important and busy people. Yet they wrote long personal letters. Whenever I write a long personal letter (by email), the most I get back is 3 or 4 sentences. And forget about having a real discussion by IM or WhatsApp — the replies are two-word sound bites. As far as I can tell, the only place real personal discussion takes place now is in person. Kind of ironic that we have far greater communication power than any of those letter writers did. I’m wondering if my experience is an outlier or if this is pretty much what everyone experiences today?

Long letters are not dead. I have a short list of old friends whom I communicate via the infrequent long email only. These are old acquaintances with whom I have no regular business with, and they have moved far away in life, so short texting conversations are irrelevant. Usually I initiate these "pen pals" by reaching out on Christmas or Eid, several years after we have lost contact, and I make it clear to them that I want to maintain infrequent long correspondence. Usually they are overjoyed and respond with great enthusiasm, as they may have never received or written a long personal letter before in their life. It often has a powerful effect on people. In terms of content, I try to avoid making the letter too personal, because we have been far separated in time and place, sharing only major milestones in life. The fact that I don't use Facebook or any social media at all helps, because people have NOT seen what I've been up to, nor have I seen what they have been doing. I believe the long letter works better than social media -- you can maintain deep, meaningful relationships, with people far away and long ago, with people of the same and opposite gender, without getting involved in the muck of social media.

I'm curious though, what DO you talk about as general topics?

Usually a book recommendation that I know jives with their interests or I bring up an old argument I had with them and show how time has lent evidence for/against me.

When I hear people refer to this as a long letter, I weep.

Just 20-30 years ago this was merely a letter. Most of my hand written letters were longer.

I still write long letters. Only to one person though, mostly. She writes back too, and we are each other's best friend. She introduced me to letter writing 5 years ago.

I've also written really long letters to a writer who has written back. I admire his work a lot. (one letter was 18 pages long, another was 42)

Curiously, I have received long responses from a lot of people, but the chain fizzled out mostly. It's just the two of us who write back and forth. I love writing letters.

It’s a result of how long it took to send messages (days to months, depending on where the recipient was), and that it didn’t usually cost more to send six sheets of paper than one. You wanted to make sure to write everything you had to say.

[edit] it should be added that most of the people whose long letters are interesting and well-written enough that we still care about them were educated a particular kind of way, or at least were immersed in a culture of those who were. Classics and rhetoric—as in, they most likely read and considered parts of Ars Rhetorica during their education—to a much greater degree than we treat those subjects now. We move farther every year, it seems, from considering those to have any value for most people.

Like a couple others in this thread, I have a hand-written correspondence with a small handful of people that I cherish.

I used to do the same like you did - email, with similar results - but I discovered there is something cathartic about sitting down and taking the time to let one's hand fly across the page, stroke after stroke. Because I write in ink, I can't take a stroke back - so I sometimes have to pause and think carefully about the next paragraph as a whole.

People respond to handwritten letters differently - it's not an email that gets sorted in their "to-do" folder only to be forgotten about. One can never be unconscious of the fact that this handwritten letter took time. Opening it, you are elated to find pages and pages of your friend's response that you can touch in your hands. The last time my correspondent even sent me an origami piece in the same envelope - he doesn't hand-write back, opting to type and print on nice paper - but my argument is that the surprise and genuine delight upon receiving a hand-written letter in the (regular!) mail compels people to respond in kind.

I recommend this quite un-modern substitute to you. If you're pressed for time, try writing a letter on a long flight.

I started writing letters to a friend and former coworker some years ago - and we live in the same city! This while we occasionally would get together for lunch, etc. He then moved elsewhere but we kept it up.

Definitely worth it.

Edit: Should add that for now we've reverted to email to limit the possibility of transmitting COVID-19 ;-)

> I’m wondering if my experience is an outlier or if this is pretty much what everyone experiences today?

I experience very much the same issues. While I do occasionally have great conversations over IM with select few people, most are similar to what you describe, write a long letter and only receive a few sentences or less. I myself though do still prefer in person conversation, too much inflection, tones and meaning is lost in text based conversation, it is even taken the wrong way a lot as a result.

Communication is shorter because it is more frequent.

If you can keep people constantly updated about whatever, there is no need to write a long letter essentially repeating yourself.

It is more frequent and more shallow. Deep sentiments are then never communicated (or even formulated). E.g. who cares really how the weather had been on your vacation, yet that is stated. But what are your plans for life once your children are grown? Are you going to share that in a WhatsUp status?

I used to do long personal emails.

I've recently started engaging my Facebook friends, Instagram followers, and new Tinder matches with daily installments. Not really a long letter, but the content is somewhere between a long letter and a short memoir. Many people are weirded out and confused but there are a number that really love it so far. I explain the concept in this video: https://youtu.be/zUC2aFkBHiw

Albus Dumbledore?!

Yeah, Marge Simpson too. It probably refers to a letter that the character wrote. But ignore those. Most of the list are real people.

I guess the Marge Simpson letter is notable because of Barbara Bush's warm and humble reply.

https://lettersofnote.com/2011/09/19/with-great-respect-marg...

> J.K. Rowling’s reply, in character as Albus Dumbledore, to a Professor of Colloid and Polymer Science who applied to become Defence Against the Dark Arts Professor at Hogwarts

I think this is mainly a problem of social norms- there are few contexts today where people assume you want to have long-form discussion without you going out on a limb and stating it explicitly. Asking someone to coffee is one that still exists; I do this with friends sometimes. But another alternative is to just take that step and explicitly state what you'd like to do. It might be a little awkward, but I bet many people would be receptive.

Long letters have no value. You can find depth in long back and forth discussions because there is an actual exchange. Long letter were conveying / creating little value compared to the amount of words they are using.

As said president macron about a philosopher "he was light because he was profound" (ligth in the french sense of not being "heavy" / painfully laborious and annoying).

Learn the value of saying less.

In my experience, such long personal letters still take place in the form of actual physical letters. That and phone calls.

Perhaps blog posts?

That’s publishing. I’m asking about one to one communication. Like the long personal letter Feynman wrote to his colleague. People seem to do much less of that.

Reddit is a modern equivalent.

I write multiple emails of this length or longer every goddamned day. There's nothing particularly long about it, and if you think so, it's because you and your pals have the attention spans of gnats.

Put away your ipotato and use something with a keyboard. Get new friends if you have to. Also, stop texting: use the audio on your phone. That's what it is for.

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