Transactional or Intentional?

 Back before email, I was the queen of penpals. The wooden mailbox on our front porch was a treasure chest for me; I would come home from school and find a note from Mandy or Allison or Katy and suddenly my school-day loneliness would fade away.

Our letters were more than just conversations about day-to-day life. Mandy gave me insights about friendship. Allison shared wisdom about poetry and wordplay. Katy gave me hope that there was a life after adolescence.

Letter-writing was more than just an exchange. It was a way of getting to know one another, and a way of getting to know ourselves. It was a quiet act of intimacy and one of endurance; each correspondence was a piece of our souls that we shared. Our friendships unfurled through our words and annual visits. Forty years later, I still have many boxes filled with yellowed stationery and our friendships are every bit as important as in times gone by.

Just before going off to college, I told my neighbor that I needed to pick up stamps so that I could send letters home from school. She told me about this new thing called Unix which meant that we’d be able to send letters through our computers. Little did I understand the depth of the change she was heralding.

With email and the eventual rise of social media, it was not just individual lives that changed. It was our whole society and the very nature of relationships.

In the era of waiting for letters and taking time to draw out our feelings in ink and paper, there was an intentionality about friendships. We didn’t find each other through scrolling down screens and contact was not validated with likes or emojis. We chose to know each other deeply and sincerely.

My social media presence aims to recreate some of the depth from the old letters, and I definitely aspire to be genuine and generous in my offerings. I’ve become who I am, after all, in part through this beautiful history of letter exchanges. However, I am also aware that this forum is a much more public one, and so its very nature is different. I value social media, and I value my friendships here, but I do feel like we’ve lost something over the years.

Instead of becoming an intentional and relationship-driven society, we have shifted into a much more transactional world.

It’s not just social media. It’s our whole pace of life now. There’s less of wandering through used book stores, wondering what treasures we will find, and more of going to an online marketplace to order a specific item. There’s less knowing our neighbors and more lunchdates with colleagues. There’s less knowing who we are inside and more knowing what we do.

Ok, this is a broad generalization and any of you who have made it this far will probably know that I’m pulling this into a “greater society” statement. So yes, maybe you know who I am inside. (Loving… seething…. scared…. disheartened….stubborn….loving…)

America began as an intentional country… we wanted to form a “more perfect Union” and our first president stepped down rather than keeping a monarchy. I am proud that we have supported rising democracies and that our outward value was human rights. Our military was not just for war but for peacetime humanitarian assistance. We have never been a perfect nation, but we have aspired to follow ideals that are based on great democratic values. (Thomas Jefferson was not perfect, either, but what a writer and thinker he was!)

Something has changed beyond the immediacy of our correspondences. Our society has become more transactional than intentional. Beyond Amazon and EBay, the nature of our transactions continues to be immediate and shortlived. The pace of our lives are faster and the duration of our commitments are more short-lived.

I will never forget the fear of January 6th, but I know many people who found the hearings to be annoying. “It happened, get over it,” an acquaintance told me. It is hard to “get over” the undoing of a nation and the rupture of ideals.

I will never forget the survivors I have met while doing oral histories from the Holocaust. The gratitude they had for America’s entrance to the war made me realize I can’t be a pacifist, but rather a peace activist. I can’t stand by when others are hurting. The US has had its spells of isolationism, but ultimately, our ideals made us jump in and combat Nazism. It was at a great cost, but democracy was imperative.

Now, though, it seems that even US allies are being treated transactionally. Our relationships with our neighbors and Europe should speak for themselves, but instead the president is using tariffs and threats—bullying tactics— to get what he wants. Rather than building on relationships and trusts, he is using a power dynamic that seems to care less about democracy than about greed.

I don’t want my friendships to be transactional. I’d like to be generous with my gifts and love and appreciate connection for connection’s sake. My world is better for our genuine love.

I don’t want my country’s power to be based on bribes or undue pressure. I want us to be a land that continues to aspire to meet lofty goals and to help others in need. I want us to be the country that the democracy-loving drafters of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution believed in.

Writers are thinkers. I want to be part of a country based on writings that matter… whether they are old letters, social media posts, or legal documents!