It’s time we do more of the long and boring stuff

24 Mar 2025

It’s exciting.

Receiving a letter that is.

No, not bills, parking fines or bank statements, I mean handwritten letters.

The handwriting, the texture of the paper… those small, subtle details that spark instant curiosity. What could it be? A wedding invite? A belated birthday card? Has someone finally won that Omaze house?

Peeling, ripping, tearing the envelope. Taking out the letter, unfolding it. Trying to piece all the clues together, jumping between ifs, nots, and maybes. There’s so much time for contemplation and excitement.

In the marketing world, direct mail feels like a throwback to a different era.

It’s nowhere to be seen in trend decks, conferences, or streams of LinkedIn posts. But the more our world slips into the synthetic and artificial, the more we crave a break from it. The more we look back and want what we once had, a perception of a simpler time.

Letters are real things. They engage multiple senses. They arrive unexpectedly, right on our doorstep. They hold depth – a kind of real-world magic. Emails replaced them, and then Slack, WhatsApp, and DMs took over emails. We now live in an age of peak communication efficiency.

But something feels off.

We know very little about how the human brain works, yet we’re creating models that will be more intelligent than the best and brightest combined.

We are more connected than ever before, yet feel increasingly disconnected from the people and world around us. The more things become available and easy, the more they seem to lose their worth.

Read the rest of the article over at the The Drum here.