The Wonderfully Guilty Pleasure of Reading Other People’s Mail

It’s a vicarious treat

Photo by sue hughes on Unsplash

Can you remember the last time you wrote someone a letter? Not an e-mail or text message, but a real, handwritten with pen and paper, mailed in a stamped envelope letter. What about one composed on an old Underwood typewriter, or even written in Microsoft Word, then printed and mailed? Has it been a month? A year? Never?

For me, it’s certainly been longer than I can recall. With the instant communication available to us today, the idea of writing letters is as archaic as still playing the Born to Run album on an 8-track tape player. Text messages and e-mails have their place (though I wish they didn’t), but the extinction of the letter carries with it the risk of losses few have considered.

One such potential loss is a personal one. Letters are uniquely personal things; e-mails and text messages could not be less personal, no matter how many emojis you insert at the end. For example, somewhere deep in an old Yahoo! Mail account there are surely hundreds of emails from my late sister. They sometimes contain information worth preserving, though most were about insignificant matters of the day. The only thing that most of them preserve about who she was is whether her preferred font was Helvetica or Times New Roman, hardly something worth printing them…