Why Does Snail Mail Feel So Good?

Words: Mahika Dhar

In a patterned room in a fairytale cottage, someone is carefully wrapping stickers, a letter, and painted postcards with pale pink tissue paper before tying off the project with a satin ribbon. Though the scene may sound folkloric, its ethereality and nostalgia are firmly rooted in the current tense, with creatives across the world flocking to snail mail subscriptions the way writers migrated to Substack a few years ago – overwhelmingly fast, with an audience that craves more. By contrast, this new version of snail mail – sweetly coined "happy mail" by TikTok users – is exploding in popularity, often in the form of pen pals or group subscriptions. 

Happy mail, by its very definition, is varied and personal, designed to be a representation of one's creativity. Still, there are a few standards; happy mail is always sent via post – its physicality is the point – and includes a variety of handmade ephemera such as DIY craft kits, stickers, art prints, and homemade zines. The origins of happy mail are rooted in the private, relegated to communication between friends who are tired of limiting their correspondence to mediums offered by the internet. Yet its popularity has grown, now used by artists, writers, and small businesses looking to build a personal connection with their audience. 

In the recent past, physical media has surged in popularity, an easy reaction against the lack of ownership in the digital age. With increasing frequency, monolithic streaming subscriptions are shunned in favour of Blu-Ray collectables and Criterion, and Spotify and Apple Music are replaced by CDs and vinyl. It seems obvious that the next target would be digital communication.

Snail mail offers a nostalgic alternative to contemporary life, similar to the growing desire to switch to "dumb phones" to escape digital noise. For a while, most of our communication has been mediated through digital forms: social media, video calls, and email. Yet there are palpable downsides to this hyper-availability, including a debilitating inability to respond to floods of messages and emails.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___

In a conversation with Cosmopolitan, Dr Mark Winwood, the Clinical Lead for Mental Health at AXA PPP Healthcare, said that owning a phone – and by extension, being constantly online – "makes you feel like you're always accessible." Such a situation is psychologically and physically exhausting, When we're 'always on' we don't allow ourselves the headspace to switch off properly, which can lead to mental fatigue.

Snail mail – like other analogue media – offers clean boundaries of communication. Unlike a text, a letter cannot be read and responded to immediately and therefore, it doesn't carry a sense of immediacy or expectation. If a friend ignores a text for a week, it might feel hurtful – but taking a week to reply to a letter feels perfectly normal.

“It offers a way to access the version of adulthood we once imagined as children, but that was abruptly stripped away when we actually arrived there.”

The alleviation of immediacy that comes with snail mail creates a sense of slowness and intentionality around communication. Longform communication already suggests a more considered writing and reading experience, but when the letters are handwritten – as they always are in happy mail – the enjoyment is doubled. In a hyper-capitalist digital economy, like the one we find ourselves in, we are constantly reminded that time is money: thirty seconds of ad revenue, impressions on a Reel, click-through rate of a TikTok. To spend our time in slowness and stillness, to resurrect a dead art for the sake of more meaningful connections, feels like an active rejection of the wishes of the digital overlords.

As a reprieve for our lack of tangible communication (unless someone is printing out their texts) handwritten letters have emerged as a new act of memory-keeping intimately tied to the tactile permanence of physical media. On the other hand, as social media ad revenue steadily declines – and Meta's rules of content appropriateness lay in constant flux – many creators who previously relied on a steady stream of income from their social media are now turning to Patreon.

On Patreon, followers can offer support by subscribing for as little as a few dollars. In turn, the creator sends slim envelopes filled with art prints, postcards, letters, and mailable trinkets – both as a gesture of thanks and a way of fostering a more intimate and meaningful community than traditional social media can offer. Snail mail then becomes a method of grassroots community, of intentional creativity with the reward of a supportive and patchworked group. To keep it affordable – and to resist the dominance of corporate shipping – packages are sent via standard post, without real-time tracking. You'll know something is coming, but you won't know exactly when it will arrive, maintaining the intrigue and spontaneity of classic mail.

This iteration of snail mail, in both its form and marketing, is a reclamation of the joy of community through the act of collecting. “It offers a way to access the version of adulthood we once imagined as children, but that was abruptly stripped away when we actually arrived there.”

After all, in the films we watched, our mailboxes were meant to be filled with letters from long-lost loves and mysterious postcards from foreign cities – a stack we could sift through and arrange across a dining table (in a house we had comfortably bought, of course). That isn't the world we grew into. But perhaps, in small pockets, it still could be.

Julianna Salguero, in a Substack essay, writes, "Your phone is not a portal, it's a vessel. It's a hollow drum. When I graze my fingers against my mother's handwriting she's in the room with me." While Salguero could – perhaps with greater ease – conjure her mother through a video call, the effort, attention, and intimacy of a letter sets the moment apart as something to be treasured. Communication in the future, as it is right now, will continue to remain digital, bound to the rectangles of phones and laptops. Snail mail does not present itself as a new mode of contact; it does not offer an innovative shift in how we connect. It does, however, offer a sweeter alternative.

Snail mail, in small doses scattered across pen pals and friend groups, is a quiet yet intentional disruption of the norm. Beyond its moral and ethical value, it's also just a wonderful feeling to hold a letter in one's hand, written with care and consideration, now to be forever commemorated between the pages of a diary or locked away in a treasure box of memories.