Room For One Headline a Day

Hi my friend ~

Do you ever ponder how many channels of communication we have nowadays? Remember when communication was by phone or snail mail? When we had to wait for a physical letter to be delivered to our mailbox, and a phone call required a real person to answer the phone?

I think it’s plausible that one of the reasons I notice deficits in my memory is due to the many modes of communication we have today. Questions I pose to myself on any given day sound like: “Where did I read that? Who did I tell that to?” “Was it by email? Text? Phone call?”

A trusted colleague, Francis, once said something in a meeting that has stuck with me: “We have room for one headline a day.” Yet, in today’s world, my phone notifies me of more headlines in a day than our grandparents got in a year. I can confidently say my brain was not wired for this much consumption of information.

As a young social worker in the 1990s, I worked in HUD-subsidized senior housing. The introduction of ‘automated phone trees’ was beginning. Many residents living in the apartment building still had rotary phones! Little did I know what the future had in store for me as I age into my own adulthood with AI and chatbots.

When my children were preschoolers, I had a [paper] phone tree to call a list of parents if there was an important announcement. Now “there’s an app for that.”

My teenage self called friends’ houses without knowing who would answer the phone. I can almost feel my face turning red now, as I think about phoning friends who had older siblings. How mortified I’d be if they answered the phone!

However brief or fleeting these moments may have been, they were still…connection. I suppose today’s world has redefined what connection looks and feels like. I remain ‘old school’ with a preference for phone conversations and the written letter.

As ever,