Too easy

Why do some easy things never actually get done?

Our writer has roused himself this year and sent out Christmas cards.  It was not a monumental effort, but did require some attention and much tedious addressing of envelopes.  This custom used to be much more widespread; it was common for most people to mail greeting cards to everyone they knew, friends and family close and distant.  For some people on your list this was the only contact you had with them all year, so often you’d include a summary of the major events.  But you had at least this contact annually.

The custom of sending out holiday cards has drastically declined over the years.  It has not yet disappeared, as writing paper letters effectively has, but it’s now rare and (in our experience) confined to people old enough to remember when letters were common.

Of course this is a result of easier and quicker ways of communication, email and texting and various forms of social media.  It’s hard to see the point in laboriously writing and addressing pieces of paper that will take days to get to the recipient, when you can bang out a message in a few seconds that will get there instantly.  And indeed there are people who have simply migrated their annual holiday greetings to email, sending electronically what used to be paper.  (There is the minor annoyance that large emailings can fall foul of spam filters, so it’s hard to send to everyone at once if you have a lot of recipients.)

But–and this is the point–not many people do so.  The number of contacts we have who do holiday emailings is far smaller than the number who used to send out Christmas cards.  It’s easier, but it’s not done.  And those people to whom you might have sent a card annually never hear from you at all.  Why?

The dinosaurs among us might incline to the theory that everything is easy and immediate nowadays, so that few people have the patience even to construct a general emailing.  This decline of moral qualities in the population can be an attractive excuse if you’re old enough, but as with selfies, we rather think that technology instead brings out qualities that are already there.

We think it’s like the tourist attractions in your home town.  It’s a truism that you never see them yourself; you can go any time, so you never do, or at least only when you have visitors from far away.  You can send an email or text to that distant friend or relation at any time, easily; so you never actually do it.  Making a task too easy means it never gets done.

Except, perhaps, by those who in a former age would have carefully maintained card-files of updated addresses for everyone, and who would have taken their packs of hand-addressed and hand-written cards to the Post Office the very first week of December.