Emails Are Making Me Happy Again
I never thought that here and now, in this particularly messy and generally hostile age of the Internet, after years of being steered toward instant messages and comment boxes and clicking little tiny hearts on posts, that I would suddenly have a new love of email.
What the hell, right?
I'm what you might refer to as an "old person," and once upon a time, email was the way to reach out and contact people on the Internet. Sure, there were chat boxes back then, and message boards, that sort of thing. But to really interact with someone online, nothing really could beat sending an email or two, or seven, or thirty, or a thousand. It's how we met new friends, how we stayed in touch with old ones, and we liked it that way.
We don't need to talk about what happened to email as time rolled on. Nobody uses it anymore, not really. Messaging on your phone, retweeting, sliding into DMs... gah. I'm breaking out into hives just thinking about it. Maybe it's gotten faster to communicate with people now, but it certainly hasn't gotten any better (and since nobody really uses email anymore, it's become a giant digital anxiety box for me, full of spam and newsletters I can't seem to unsubscribe from, and notifications about bills and privacy breaches and things that I just really don't even want to think about; I know you all know what I'm talking about).
And yet.
A tiny sparkle of joy.
I blame it fully on Bear, to be honest, my resurrected love of email. It's simple, really. Most of the people blogging here that I love to read just don't have any other way to contact them except through email. No comment boxes. No social media links. No little retweet buttons.
Just email addresses and "write me and say hi" notes.
So now my inbox isn't just garbage and anxiety. It's starting to fill up with actual messages from actual humans. I've forgotten what it was like to have real conversations with people in a long-form fashion, instead of quick little DMs or replies in comments sections. And it's so lovely, you know? Being able to think about what I've just read, and think about what to say back, without any real time pressures or constraints. It's allowing for deeper and more meaningful interactions with people, and I absolutely fucking love it.
I love it so much that I made a swear up there.
So I'm giving out a special thank you to the people I'm emailing these days (you know who you are), and I look forward to keeping it up over the long run. I'm also looking forward to meeting more of you folks as time goes on, through the "everything old is new again" email thing.
Old school is the best school.
(Feel free to hit me up via the little contact button under this post!)
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