Try This Challenge to Connect More Deeply With the People in Your Life

Downtime This Old-School Habit Completely Changed the Way I Think About Connecting With People In the 2020s, we’re constantly in touch with everyone but still lonely. This week, let’s try something different. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Dan Kois? Aug 17, 20262:00 PM Illustration by Tolga Akdoğan. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Welcome to Party Like It’s 1996, a six-week time-travel challenge to help you rediscover the lost art of hanging out. Sign up here to get this series in your inbox. Hey there! Welcome back to Party Like It’s 1996, Slate’s newsletter challenge for 1990s wannabes. (If you missed the first installments of this series, go back and catch up starting here). Last week I asked you to spend a night out on the town that really focused on being where you were rather than where else you could be, and embracing serendipity and even mistakes. Well, mission accomplished: Y’all had some great nights! Some of you went out alone and struck up conversations with folks at the bar or at the open mic. Some of you ended up watching the Anne Hathaway dinosaur movie. Jessie G. went thrift shopping for cassette tapes and listened to them with friends on the beach. Kassia G. brought a friend from out of town out to a bar “and introduced her to everyone I saw that night.” Lucy B. brought a book with her, and discovered that reading a 17th-century philosopher in a coffee shop will definitely get people talking to you. And reader Alee Q. sent me a lovely story about taking her mom to her favorite bar in Carbondale, Illinois, and running into characters galore from life and work. “In Carbondale, we often still do things the old-fashioned way,” she wrote, and I do think there is something about medium-sized college towns (Carbondale is the home of Southern Illinois University) that fosters serendipitous encounters—even if you’re not a college student, the infrastructure and spirit of the town seem built for the analog night out. Me? On Friday afternoon Kevin texted that he was going to the beer garden, so I met him and Ashley there, and I taught them The Game (not that The Game), and then I suggested we go to the movies. These days, when you call a theater on the telephone to ask them if they’re showing a particular film, you’ll hear a really long pause, and then some rustling sounds, and then the sound of an employee asking her manager something, and then “I don’t think so.” But eventually we found a theater playing Tony, a terrific movie that itself contains a lot of 1979-era big nights out, most of which end very badly. We certainly did not party the way 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain did. We didn’t start a single fistfight, or land in a heap on a single sidewalk after being tossed out of a bar. But we did make decisions about our evening on the fly, and we did avoid using our phones to find out what everyone else was doing elsewhere in our town (or on the whole internet). We never once ran out of things to talk about! It was a good night out. Imagine, for a moment, that you received this missive not in your email inbox but in an envelope in your mailbox. When was the last time you received mail from someone you love? Until recently, for me, it was somewhere around 2004. But a few years ago, frustrated with the way I was passively experiencing my faraway friends’ lives—reading status updates, looking at photos, actually interacting with them once per year—I vowed to do things differently. I vowed to start writing letters. Look, group chats are obviously one of the great inventions of the 21st century. Humankind will never devise a better way to make a bunch of friends who live in different time zones laugh simultaneously at the same SpongeBob GIF. I am not suggesting they should go away. But the group chat shares a fundamental characteristic with most of the other innovations in 21st-century communication. Like a Facebook post or a tweet, it is fundamentally a short message designed to be read by an audience—that is to say, as with all these other modes, the group texter is broadcasting, not communicating. And even the single-person text, while immensely valuable for maintaining a relationship with someone who is not in the same physical space as you, is a fragmented communication mode, one that is slipped in over hours and days amongst all the other tasks and responsibilities of life. “I love you,” you might text to your brother or best friend or former dermatologist, and then you do some work, and drive to the grocery store, and look at Instagram, and later you notice that at some point they texted, “Iove you too.” A meaningful message, to be sure. But you weren’t there, in the moment, to receive it. And so I want you, for the next week, to diversify your communication with the people you love: CHALLENGE NO. 2: STAYING IN TOUCH This is an ALL-WEEK challenge. Each day for the next week, I want you to try to: Make one phone call;Mail one postcard or letter; ORSend one real email. My new letter-writing habit has really changed the way I think about communication. Sitting down to write to one person, and one person only, focuses my attention wonderfully on that person. I love knowing that, two or three days later, my feelings will be delivered to them (and only them) via a pleasant surprise in their mailbox. The postcard is a punchier but still meaningful version of that same impulse—a quick pat on the back rather than a long embrace. The phone call is ephemeral but intimate, putting two people’s voices right into each other’s heads at the same time. The personal email’s power is its intrusion upon the inbox, a location now so heavily work-and-commerce-coded that a personal, loving interaction amid the spam can be shocking and moving. I’ve come to believe that all these archaic modes of communication have real power in our atomized age, in part because they feel so surprising to the recipient: What would your group chat do if you sent them all a long email about your life? What if you mailed your mom a postcard, or called a high school friend one night unexpectedly? Some may view the ringing of their phone as an act of violence perpetrated upon them by you. Some may respond to your outreach in the spirit of my friend Allison, who texted me, “Nice try. You’re not getting me to write a letter.” But others will surprise you by replying to your email, writing you a postcard, or answering your call—or they might even expand the options by sending you a card, drawing you a picture, leaving you a voice note, dropping in via FaceTime. What’s important for the next week is that you are reaching out to the people you care about at a lot of different lengths and paces: sometimes instantaneous, sometimes whenever someone is ready to respond, sometimes over the course of days or weeks. Your relationships will be the richer for it. Next week we’ll embark on what just might be the most terrifying challenge of the bunch. Gird your loins! But first I want to know: How were your phone calls? Did everyone assume you were calling with bad news? Were your friends baffled by your postcards? (“Is this like … a text, but on paper?”) Send me a long and detailed note telling me all about it at 1996@slate.com. Love, Dan Relationships Friendship Party Like It’s 1996