Correspondence

reviving email

published on 07.08.24



One of my more recent joys is correspondence.

As a young Millenial I was always slightly annoyed that we missed the era of writing letters. In elementary school we did pen pals, but that was pretty much it. The closest thing to correspondence we experienced was birthday cards from Grandma Gail maybe. Or letters while we were at summer camp. And of course those were always special, even when they were prosaic.

Those letters sent to us while at camp were actually just printed emails (except for the ones from Grandma Gail, in beautiful indecipherable script). The internet is actually the closest thing to letters my generation has. And it is actually a wonderful thing to cultivate online. Funnily, I feel it is often forgotten about or ignored. DMs have killed the email. And as is often the case, the culprit is social media.

It's a shame too, because email is extremely fun outside of a work context (even in a work context it can be great). Over the last few years I've been sharing more of my work on the internet and meeting people here who I feel connected with. This has led to more direct correspondence with people who aren't family or in my life everyday. And I quite enjoy my little queue of emails that I maintain. Sometimes things get busy and weeks (or even months) go by before I am able to respond properly to questions in my Twitter inbox or email, but treating them as important (while still just being fun) has been awesome.

What do we correspond about?

All kinds of stuff really. We discuss work of ours, give feedback, plan collaborations, discuss timelines for things. We share interesting links, good reading or podcasts we've encountered. We plan coffee meetups when one of us is in town. We schedule video chats. It's great!

Email has let me exchange messages with some of my favorite writers, artists, and designers. It has helped me reach and coordinate with incredibly cool people I want to chat with for my podcast. Email rules.

I am honestly not sure why I've felt called to write about this for the last week or so other than that this newer routine of mine is pretty enjoyable and I think reclaiming the beauty of connecting with people similiar to yourself all over the world that the internet originally promised is worthwhile. Having a personal website + a healthy habit of correspondence is the good kind of internet, the good kind of connected.

So any way, if you ever want to shoot me an email, please do: jacobweber530@gmail.com. More on this later I am sure!

Collected reading on this topic
https://jakeweber.net/essays/correspondence.html
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