Good news: the kids have always been terrible ✨

September 6, 2026

| THE EPISTOLARIAN |

In eighth grade, our technology teacher put the following quotation on the whiteboard, something along the lines of:

“The children now have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”

We felt he clearly was writing about us. We had become rather efficient at proving his point: being younger and naturally more comfortable with technology, we had figured out how to copy and paste our way through his typing exercises in a fraction of the allotted time, leaving us free to browse the internet and chatter.

Quite pleased with himself, and unaware that we had just cheated our way through his typing exercises, he explained that he hadn’t come up with the quotation. It was Socrates.

For years, I thought about this realization: the way we millennials were seen was the way youth had always been seen.

Not that it particularly matters, but much later I learned it wasn’t Socrates at all. So there was perhaps another early lesson about information technology buried in there. The line traces to Kenneth John Freeman, who in 1907 summarized ancient Greek complaints about the young: “luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise.” So my technology teacher had the author wrong, but not the point. For more than two thousand years, adults have been worrying about what the young are becoming.

As a millennial, I have grown up alongside an ever-rotating Rolodex of things supposedly poised to ruin us (which also, rather efficiently, replaced the Rolodex): the internet, cellphones, social media. As children, we were warned never to meet people from the internet or get into strangers’ cars. Now we summon strangers from the internet specifically to get into their cars. Apparently the problem was that we weren’t paying them?!

Online and offline have fused into one existence; they are simply different ways of experiencing a life.

With my book coming out in October, I keep encountering things that remind me why this particular moment matters so much for handwriting, wax seals, and letters.

This week, my friend Michelle A. sent me an Instagram reel about what its creator called “the great simplification,” the flattening of information into increasingly digestible forms. The poster explained that “complex human emotions and experiences can’t always be boiled down to a hook or a list.”

I don’t disagree. Our ability to consume information for long periods without distraction may be diminishing, and perhaps we increasingly require great ideas to entertain us before we will entertain them.

But I also wonder whether some of our fear of technology is an ancient fear in new clothes.

In Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates tell a story about the invention of writing. The Egyptian king Thamus warns that writing will produce forgetfulness because people will rely on external marks rather than exercising their own memories. In other words, Plato was worried that writing things down would make us stupid. I am beginning to suspect there really are no new arguments.

Centuries later, pobrecito Johannes Trithemius found himself defending another inefficient technology. In 1492, as printed books were replacing manuscripts copied by hand, he wrote an entire defense of scribes. Printing was faster, but Trithemius wasn’t convinced that faster was the only thing that mattered.

“Who does not know how great the difference is between writing and printing?”

I feel ya, Trithemius.

By the nineteenth century, Nietzsche got a typewriter, and of course, it became philosophical. He and a friend noticed that his writing changed when he used the machine. The instrument used to record thought seemed capable of changing the thought itself.

All of these old anxieties feel particularly familiar now. Our phones, the internet, social media, and now AI have raised fears about what we might lose: intelligence, attention, memory, even our ability to compete in the world.

These questions have real implications. But I keep wondering: What is the point of a better memory or greater intelligence or great efficiency? What are we hoping to do with them? What makes a great life?

I have no particular attachment to thinking hard for the sake of thinking hard. If a machine can spare me three hours of ultimately unfulfilling work, fantastic. What interests me is what I do with the three hours.

This is why, to me, the Handwritten Life is so important.

I’m not saying we should write by hand so we can have better memories or live longer, though I suspect some scientist could back me up, at least in part. I’m saying that the quality of our lives changes when we write by hand and make things by hand.

The purpose of technological efficiency should not be to make human beings more efficient. Technology should make the things we do not value faster so that we can make the things we do value slower.

And, somewhat absurdly, because of course, pretty much all of the inefficiencies I most desperately want technology to eliminate are inefficiencies technology created in the first place: notifications, complex tax documents, 20-page doctor visit forms, and the approximately seventeen steps now required to accomplish something that once was a conversation with a human.

By all means, O great and mighty Simplification, have at them.

But the things that expand life, that make us feel alive, or change how we experience the world, are precisely the things we should be reluctant to make efficient: reading, cooking a good meal, listening to music, gardening, having tea with a friend with no end time.

Or, of course, writing a letter.

Our technology has already taught us something about this in the way it has transformed communication. Most communication has moved to phone calls, video chats, email, texts, and social media comments. If our goal as human beings were merely the transmission of information, we would have no need for the handwritten letter.

But the most important communication isn’t only about content. It's about being in your life, in its reflection and complexity, before inviting another person to meet you there on the page.

A letter is slow, deliberately slow. Slowness is not inherently virtuous. Five hours on the customer-service line with your telecom provider may bring you into communion with eternity, but that does not make it more valuable. Sometimes, though, the time something takes is part of what makes it special.

You can write for a while and decide you were wrong or the idea wasn't complete. You can send the page to the recycle bin and begin again. You can allow the words to travel through your body and onto the page. You can take the time to discover what you actually think before asking someone else to sit with it too.

The point of making everything else faster should be to have more time for this.

Not to make ourselves paragons of efficiency, but to give ourselves the leisure to be gloriously inefficient at the things that make being human richer.

Winged Victory Pre-Order

The first Collector’s Edition Winged Victories went out last week. The sculptural, luminous resin elevates the Winged Victory from an object for the desk into a work of art in its own right, something meant to live beautifully on display even when it is not in use.

This next edition is expected to ship in early November, making now the perfect time to order if you would like yours to arrive in time for the holidays.

Winged Victory (Pre-Order)