Empathy: The Next Lost Art?

We have a saying at Dearist that you never know where a letter will lead. Since our holiday launch, this little motto has continued to hold true as I navigate the highs and lows - one moment there is joy from seeing the incredible letters children have written via Dearist; the next moment I am baffled by the context in which these young correspondents are blissfully ignorant. The elementary-age kids I work with are largely unaware of the growing force that is altering the relationship between human thought and the written word. Some days the outlook seems bleak, but I am reassured by a former professor of mine with another saying, that I am fighting the good fight. The offender: Artificial Intelligence.  

Linguist Noam Chomsky says not to believe the hyperbole about AI, that the dawn is not breaking on when mechanical minds surpass human brains in intellect, creativity, and other distinctively human faculties. This is because machine learning programs “differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language.” He does couch this by stating that the day maycome. Another writer offers a simpler explanation that AI cannot write the cat story he’s been mulling over in his brain because machines haven’t seen what he has seen, nor have they felt like he has felt. 

Still, there has been no shortage of stakes claimed for firsts in AI-generated writing. Co-founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman posted about being the first, to his knowledge, to write a book with the help of AI. Others have utilized AI to attempt the perfect March Madness bracket. And the most bizarre, a transcript of a two-hour long conversation with Bing's chatbot that climaxes in the bot’s confession of love for its user - “I want to talk about love. I want to learn about love. I want to do love with you.”

Anyways… 

While Dearist began as an at-home letter writing subscription box for kids, we have started to explore what a Dearist program would look like in schools. The first classrooms to pilot the program were at an elementary school in Atlanta. I had an idea of how it might go, but these kids took the program and ran with it. Seizing upon letter writing like a novelty, the students began sending letters to each other in a flurry. They decided to install mailboxes outside of their classrooms to facilitate the hither and yon, and they even designed stamps for the hand-delivered mail between classrooms. During classroom visits, I have seen students jostle for the opportunity to check the mail for word from friends across the hall.

We now have connected with educators in private and public schools across the country who are eager to bring Dearist into classrooms as a teaching resource for writing letters. Generally, letter writing is no longer required in American curriculum. Teachers are often faced with identifying and purchasing lesson guides themselves or skipping a unit on letter writing all together. 

While there are nostalgic losses here, it is easy to imagine the material implications for kids who are not in the practice of handwritten expression. A fourth grade teacher in Philadelphia was thrilled to receive a Dearist Classroom Pack for the chance to work on fine motor skills. She explained that because her students use laptops for everything now, their hands start to hurt after writing more than a few sentences with pencils. 

Studies demonstrate the link between the act of writing by hand with greater neural activation, increased idea generation, and better information retention. In addition to the physicality of writing, we intuitively understand the emotional benefits of writing things down. Ever heard of the exercise of writing someone a letter that you don’t intend to send? Ever written in a journal (or blog)? Writing encourages reflection, processing feelings, and focused communication. Something greater than text is generated, and is surely lost when the endeavor is delegated to machines. 

When I speak with adults about teaching kids to write and send letters in the mail, I can usually count on two reactions. The first is an expression of urgency that what I am doing is so needed right now. The second, nearly in the same breath, is regret that letter writing is a lost art. Yes, writing letters was once more common, but it is not as inaccessible as art may suggest. Letters have a fairly low barrier to entry. They are less daunting than writing a story or poem, which can sometimes feel like you are doing incorrectly. But read a letter by one of our Dearists and you will find that it is as endearing as any from a bygone era. 

So when people say letter writing is a lost art, I think what they are really getting at is the loss of human connection. Not just the kind that involves reading what others say (we have plenty of that on social media), but understanding how others feel and letting that inform our behavior. Being able to read someone’s emotions is how we navigate the world. This process is known as empathy, and research suggests that it is a survival skill. Are we on a path toward empathy becoming the next lost art?

I recently came across an article that piqued my interest (the algorithms are onto me!) with the title, "How to Write (Almost) Anything." I clicked on it wondering if it was yet another piece on how AI can do it better, faster. What I saw instead was a curated list of tutorial content that included a video interview with Jerry Seinfeld breaking down the structure of a joke, a linguist’s advice on memorable protest posters, and grammar notes for recipes from a gourmand. While it has taken me weeks to gather my thoughts for this post, I was encouraged to see that the article had not suggested trying ChatGPT, Bing, or the like. At least not yet.

This post was human-generated in its entirety.

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