Communication is so hard. At the best of the times, it’s difficult, but in the mid-twenties of the twenty-first century it seems to be actively sabotaged by everything around us. We stopped writing letters decades ago and all that comes in the mail is redundant bills that we’ve already paid, spam and scam and roofing messages. Political campaigns and credit card campaigns and colleges hoping we’ve paid off our degrees so that we can remember them fondly to the tune of thousands of dollars more….
Then email vanished under inundation of spam and scam. Nigerian princes are quaint. Now it’s carefully crafted mass-generated AI-spewn traps whose spelling and grammar gets more and more human every year. The automated processes that are supposed to help us sort it all have marginal success rates, wiping out intentional mailing lists and important communications, banishing them into the ether of “updates” or never double-checked spam filters…
And we have these amazing pocket computers that once-upon-a-time were phones, but they too are so inundated with fake calls and the eternally hopeful scammers that it’s become unheard of to pick up the phone. Literally. It used to be that we had to remind people to turn off the ringers on their phones. Nowadays it’s laughable that anyone under the age of 60 might actually have their phone on any setting OTHER than silent.
And so we have fragmented remaindered messaging in the form of Instagram DMs and Faceboom Messenger and Twitter direct messages and What’s App, an application I tout my ignorance of via the application of punctuation.
How do we survive all the noise?
God / Google forbid we actually REACH someone because they flinch at hearing from you, waiting for the worst. Constant negative messaging has us programmed to expect it. Constant reinforcement from genuinely terrible people may be statistically negligible but that’s not how our minds work, taking the 5% bad in a 95% good day and mulling it and churning it endlessly till it’s all that we remember.
Everything hurts and I don’t know how to solve it. I don’t know how to reach you. I don’t know how to say what I mean to say even when I do. Hell, maybe my message simply gets there too late.