When it comes time to talk about important shit, pick the right way to do it. Text messages, email, and written letters have their places and their uses, but when it comes to conversations that really matter (about things like relationships, sex, money, legal contracts, etc.) get to face-to-face, or at the very least, get on the phone. Yes, it’s less convenient, but you’ll be less likely to miss important details, misunderstand, or miscommunicate. You’ll also be 100% less likely to be autocorrected into telling someone to “shave the date,” or ordering “Egg rolls with fuck sauce.”
Don’t think I’m anti-text/anti-email. Especially because it’s possible text messages won’t even be a thing when you’re old enough to read this. We will have certainly developed new ways of communicating short snippets of information by then, who knows, maybe we’ll be sending mini-holograms back and forth. But, unless that technology manages to perfectly replicate every nuance of in-person communication, it will still be imperfect. More importantly, it will be at least one step removed from in-person communication, which by design, reduces the emotional immediacy and impact of that communication. What’s that mean? The further removed you are from a person, the easier it is to say something you wouldn’t say to their face.
Visit any social media site for extreme examples of the impact this distancing has on communication. People will happily pile on one obscene comment after another, suggesting people eat shit, go and have sex with themselves, or die in a fire. People don’t say things like that to other people’s faces because when face-to-face, they can’t avoid the emotional impact of their words. They also can’t avoid a punch in the nose. We’ll revisit that emotional impact in a quote below, but first, let’s talk about why texting isn’t for important shit.
It’s a useful invention, and a great tool for communicating, when you’re aware of its limitations. Credit here to Maria Popova of The Marginalian. In her round-up of resolutions worth making, she makes a case for the value of “real human communication.”
Texting, with its ready-made emojis and its immediacy, is a superb medium for communication of levity and logistics. But where it triumphs in time-sensitive matters, it fails abysmally in matters of emotional sensitivity — I don’t know of a single relationship that has been improved, repaired, or saved by texting in those vital and vulnerable moments of emotional misalignment and miscommunication, where the medium’s immediacy becomes a gauntlet of mutual reactivity and its two-way disembodiment a way of avoiding the evidence of one’s emotional impact on the other. Here, conversation triumphs.
She goes on to cite Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing on the power of and value of real human communication, which is beautiful and worth a read, but for the purposes of this lesson, Maria captured the important part.
I’ve long believed that texting is a terrible way to communicate about things that matter. Fart jokes and directions? Yes. Anything that might be made worse by misunderstanding or misreading? No. That’s because tone is really hard to understand in written text.
Here’s an example: We were emailing with a realtor about homes we are considering buying. One of the homes had a run-down, super creepy looking shed in the back yard. In my email to her, I said, “Oh great! This place has a murder shed we can keep our ‘guests’ in.” I sent the email, laughed about it with your Mom, and then an hour later it hit me that I didn’t really know this realtor, and she didn’t know me. She was going to show us homes by herself, and here I was joking about murdering people. Oops. I immediately followed up with another email that noted since tone is hard in email, I was making jokes, and that there would be no murders, no “guests,” and definitely no murder shed.
Thankfully, she had a good sense of humor. Crisis averted. But in person, tone is part of the message. The way you deliver that sentence, the tone and mannerisms you use will tell the other person you’re either joking, joking awkwardly about murder because you’re awkward, or not really joking because you might be a murderer. Written text lacks that tone.
Same thing goes for any important conversation. To revisit Popover’s quote,
I don’t know of a single relationship that has been improved, repaired, or saved by texting in those vital and vulnerable moments of emotional misalignment and miscommunication, where the medium’s immediacy becomes a gauntlet of mutual reactivity and its two-way disembodiment a way of avoiding the evidence of one’s emotional impact on the other.
That two-way disembodiment she speaks of is the removal of all the bodily cues that come with language, and those cues are often more important than the words themselves. The tone, volume, and pitch of your voice, your facial expressions, where you look, the way you move your body, your hands, and even the way you pause, none of this comes through in a written text message. How important is all that “other stuff?” It’s important enough to either support or completely invalidate your message.
Imagine these scenarios: In the first, you’re sitting on a bench in the park with your girlfriend, you pause mid-sentence, squeeze her hand and say, “you know, I love you.” She’ll probably believe you. She might even say she loves you too. In the second scenario, you’re on the same bench with your girlfriend, you pause mid-sentence, squeeze out a fart and say, “you know, I love you.” She might believe you shit your pants, but she’s definitely not going to tell you she loves you too. Finally, let’s put the fart on the other foot. Same bench, same girl. You squeeze out your fart, because you have gas and can’t help it, and then say, “I love you” for the first time. She sighs, looks you in the eyes, says, “I love you too,” as she rips a big fart of her own. Do you believe her? Of course you do. It’s a completely different message, and now you’re both floating on an especially noxious cloud of love.
And yes, those are hyperbolic examples, but the point holds; the things you don’t say can be more important than the things you do. At the very least, they can either support your intent or completely invalidate it. Same holds true on the receiving end of any communication.
So, the next time you have something important to communicate, mind how you say it. While it might be infinitely more convenient to thumb out a text or fire off an email, if there’s a chance the message might be misunderstood, if there’s a subtle nuance you’re worried about the message receiver understanding, pick up the phone or get face-to-face. It can make all the difference in the ducking world.
I love you,
Dad
I originally planned to finish this series in twelve months, intending to write one entry a week for 52 weeks. But, other things came up and I didn’t have as much time as I thought I would. We moved, you started a new school, I had other projects, etc. But finally, I’m starting my last entry in September, nine months after I’d planned. Which is the perfect intro to this one.
Time is funny like that. It marches on like a metronome, indifferent to how much you wish it would slow down or speed up. It offers no do-overs, no matter how frivolously you spend it. And it gives zero fucks what you planned to accomplish in the time you had. Once that time is over, you’ll get no more. But, it also stretches out ahead of you into an unknown future, offering untold possibility and infinite choices.
Which is why I hope you both learn to make choices about how you spend your time and understand what those choices mean. Because while there’s never enough time for everything, there’s still enough time to do almost anything.