Sitting across from someone, the low light of the café catching the glow of their phone screen as it illuminates their face its 8:00PM East African time. A notification flashes💬. Then another. Their thumb dances across the glass side to side, a frantic, silent ballet. They are here, but they are also somewhere else, fragmented across a dozen digital conversations. The feeling of a peculiar kind of drought, a deep, modern loneliness that settles in the chest.
This thirst is for a time we either barely remember or only know from stories—a time when communication was an act of pilgrimage, not a flick of the thumb. We are drowning in a sea of constant, easy contact, yet we are parched for genuine connection. By romanticizing the past, we risk simplification, but in looking back at the era of letter-writing, we find a powerful illustration of what our relationships may have lost in their relentless pursuit of immediacy.
Imagine, for a moment, the world of your grandparents. Love was a currency of patience. A courtship often began with a stolen glance across a crowded market on market day in the local town center, followed by the agonizing, delicious wait for a letter (if they were lucky enough to know how to read and write). The act itself was a ritual. It began with the selection of the paper—perhaps a simple, lined sheet or something more elegant, carrying the faint scent of its owner. The pen, dipped in ink, would glide, the writer carefully funeling their thoughts. Every word was chosen with intention, for space was limited and the journey was long. There was no backspace key to erase a clumsy phrase not even the TAB key to let autocomplete finish the word, only the commitment of ink on paper.
The writer would describe their day, not as a mundane list of events, but as a landscape they wished the other person could see. They painted pictures with words: the way the morning sun slanted across the veranda, the taste of the first mango of the season, the sound of the crickets at dusk. They would ask questions and then have to live in the space of not knowing the answer for days, perhaps weeks. This space, this gap in communication, was not an empty void; it was filled with anticipation, imagination, and longing. It allowed affection to steep, to deepen in flavor.
Once written, the letter was folded, sealed—perhaps with a kiss—and embarked on its own journey. It was carried to the post office, a tangible expression of effort. It traveled by bus, by train, handled by strangers, until it reached its destination, tired but ready to read. The arrival of the postman was an event. The sight of that familiar handwriting on an envelope could make a heart leap. The letter was not glanced at while walking or driving not even asking Siri to read it aloud; it was taken to a quiet place, opened with care, and savoured. Each sentence was read and re-read, the recipient tracing the loops of the letters (the "Ps and Os", imagining the hand that formed them. This single piece of paper was a physical artifact of affection, a tangible proof of being thought of, of being cherished. It could be stored in a wooden box and revisited years later, its creases and faded ink a testament to a love that was built on effort and time.
Sometimes the interaction with the wooden box was not as good but still in the romatic theme like here. (If video doesn't play watch here; 👉🏾 Play Video
Now, consider our world. We have collapsed time and space, but in doing so, we have flattened the landscape of romance. The first flush of connection is no longer a slow burn; it's an instantaneous conflagration of texts, DMs, and social media follows. The "good morning" text arrives before our eyes are fully open, a perfunctory digital check-in. The conversation is a relentless, unending stream of consciousness. “wyd?” “nm u?” “lol” “brb”. We share memes, links, and fleeting thoughts, a constant barrage of digital confetti that rarely adds up to a celebration.
The quiet, reflective space of anticipation has been replaced by the frantic anxiety of the three bouncing dots. The silence between messages is no longer a space for longing, but a breeding ground for insecurity. “They saw my message. Why haven’t they replied?” We have traded the poetry of a well-crafted sentence for the efficiency of an emoji. We have traded the artifact of a treasured letter for the ephemeral blue bubble of a read receipt.
This cultural shift from scarcity to abundance has had a paradoxical effect. When communication was scarce, it was valuable. Each word mattered. Now that it is abundant, it has become devalued, disposable. We are constantly “in touch,” but we are rarely truly touched. The ease of it all has made us lazy in our expressions of love. We no longer need to paint a picture with words because we can send a picture instead. We no longer need to describe our feelings in detail because a heart emoji will suffice.
This is the source of our thirst. We are filled, but not nourished. We crave the feeling of being the sole subject of someone’s focused attention, even for a few minutes. We long to know that someone set aside time in their day, put pen to paper, and thought only of us. To have someone write about you is to be seen, to be mythologized in the story of their heart. It is an act of creative devotion. A text message says, “I’m thinking of you right now.” A letter says, “You are so important that I have built this monument of words to you, a thing you can hold and keep long after this moment has passed.”
We cannot and should not turn back the clock. Technology has connected us in wondrous ways. But perhaps we can learn from the past. Perhaps we can carve out small moments for a more deliberate, more thoughtful form of communication. To leave a handwritten note. To send an email that is crafted with the care of a letter. To put our phones away and offer the person in front of us the undivided attention their grandparents gave to a piece of paper. To recognize that in relationships, as in a desert, it is not the volume of water that matters, but its purity and its power to truly quench.
We are all dying of this thirst. Who will write for us?
Listen along; Sing About Me, I'm Dying Of Thirst