Letters in 2025

Recently on NPR’s website there was a post advocating good old fashioned letter writing as a way of keeping in contact with people.

And I have to admit it’s kind of cute idea, because not only is it incredibly retro, receiving a letter is such a unique event these days, it would most definitely be something special.

Even in my youth, when people still routinely wrote letters, those from close friends and lovers, written on cheap A4 notepad paper, the sort with the prepunched binder holes in the margin, were something special and magical.

And they were something wonderful, telling of outrageous adventures in exotic lands, or even just the experience of working in an archives centre in a far off town.

Not only did they bring news, they helped maintain the link.

 Today it would be a Whatsapp message or two, or perhaps an email with a word file and some jpegs attached.

Writing letters, like retro photography, is little more than an affectation. It's a fun thing to do once or twice, but really, really not a viable means of communication.

I’m sure we’ve all wanted to take time out from the modern world, and live in an old stone town in a Mediterranean village somewhere, to write, to paint, and indulge the fantasy of living lime early 1960s beatniks, communicating only by letter and relying on an inefficient and erratic postal sevice.

In reality we know it’s not possible. Niko’s cafe has wifi now, this week’s password written on the back wall of the bar for all to see, and everyone has a laptop or an iPad in front of them as they sip their evening aperitifs.

The world has changed.

No one writes letters anymore. The postal service would really rather not have to deal with them (the Danish Post Office is going to stop delivering letters at the end of 2025, and here in Australia the mailman only comes three days a week), and so letter writing as a cultural phenomenon, brought about by 175 years of a cheap and universal postal service dies...