In an age of instant everything, postcards keep the slow magic alive

For five years until it closed shop on Sept 30, a quaint, little space sat at the basement of the Fullerton hotel, valiantly keeping a vanishing tradition alive – sending postcards.

It was the Philatelic Store@Fullerton. It was also a post office – a call-back to the Fullerton’s past life as Singapore’s General Post Office.

A red pillar post box sat at a corner – a reminder that, once upon a time, this was a place where people gathered to mail their carefully crafted thoughts, written on a piece of card or paper, to reach out to people from far away who were like them searching for a connection to affirm that feeling that they were not alone.

With the internet reducing communications to bits and bytes and online noise and chatter, writing letters by hand is fast becoming a rare craft.

Thankfully, there are holdouts.

Ms May Baetiong-Sebastian, 48, a former journalist in the Philippines who now lives in Annapolis, Maryland, said she turned to sending postcards out of a need for a deeper connection.

“These days, it’s so easy to text or hop on a video call, but sending a postcard feels more personal and more thoughtful,” she told The Straits Times.

She got into writing postcards through her sister, who is big into stamp collecting.

Her sister urged her to join PostCrossing, a website that hosts people who still like to send postcards and get some in return.

“I signed up mainly to support her. I planned to give her all the postcards I received,” she said.

But then, she got hooked.

She said she initially had concerns about having to share her address with strangers, but those quickly dissipated when the first postcards started to arrive.

“There’s something beautiful about waiting for something to arrive in the mail or taking a quiet moment to craft a message. It might feel old-fashioned, but I think that’s part of the charm,” she said.

Ms Sebastian said she finds it “really therapeutic to sit down with a pen and write something by hand”.

She has since sent 107 postcards and received 103 in return.

PostCrossing currently has over 800,000 members who have exchanged at least 25 million postcards.

It’s cool

Books Beyond Borders sells postcards and stamps, and has a retro red post box at its charming, little bookshop just across the Maxwell MRT station.

Ms Yu Xuan Tan, 23, a sales assistant at the bookshop, said the postcards – which sell for S$8 each – don’t exactly move the sales needle, but they do have their fair share of buyers.

“In a day, it depends on the day, we may sell anywhere from zero to five, or one person getting multiple postcards,” she said.

All buyers are tourists.

Ms Tan said she thinks people still buy postcards because “it’s cool”.

“The snail mail system is cool, and they want to send art to friends, like a small souvenir,” she said.

But while it isn’t gone yet, postcard sending has been on a rapid decline since the 1990s.

Postcards mailed in the United States have fallen sharply from around 3 billion in 1996 to 1.2 billion in 2022, and the number is still shrinking, according to the US Postal Service.

The number is being held up only by a community of diehard loyalists, mostly travellers, collectors and hobbyists, and people who are still drawn to ink and paper.

For them, postcards offer an emotional depth that digital communication often lacks.

Postcards also offer respite from “digital fatigue”, that overwhelming feeling and exhaustion triggered by non-stop notifications and messages screaming out of phones and computers.

According to a 2022 study by the University of Texas, receiving a handwritten note can boost feelings of connection and appreciation significantly more than receiving a text message or an e-mail.

Not surprisingly, postcard sending remains entrenched in nations where letter writing is still a key part of the cultural landscape.

In Japan, for instance, the deeply rooted tradition known as “nengajo” – sending New Year postcards – is alive and well.

Every year in December, Japan mobilises its entire mailing infrastructure – hiring hundreds of thousands of part-time workers, installing dedicated collection boxes, rerouting transport routes, and creating separate sorting lines – to make sure New Year postcards reach their recipients exactly on Jan 1.

If you’re reading this, you made it’

In recent years, postcard sending has found a lifeline in, of all places, social media.

TikTok, for instance, has seen many of its young users hopping on trends like sending postcards to their future selves

In Taiwan, there are cafes that let their customers write their postcards and, for a small fee, have these delivered to them a month, or even 10 years, later.

The cafes store the cards in a physical archive, and their employees sort through it and deliver the cards when their delivery dates are due.

Some cafes in Taiwan have as many as 10,000 of these postcards delivered each year.

In China, there are specialised “time post offices” that have slots with future dates for those wanting to send postcards to their future selves.

This trend is slowly catching on in Singapore.

In November, the Korean cafe Nuldam Space opened its doors at the newly revamped SCAPE youth hub.

Customers can buy a postcard there, write a message to their future selves, seal the card with wax, drop it to numbered cubbies on a “365 wall”, and have it delivered within a year from then.

These postcards are like a voice from the past meant to console, assure or just check up on their senders.

“It felt like a little time capsule,” said a TikTok user named Lingdingdong who sent her postcard at a “time post office” in Shanghai.

Most messages are words of encouragement.

One postcard sender fresh off a break-up wrote at a Taipei cafe: “If you’re reading this, you made it.”

There are other social trends breathing new life into postcard sending that are a hybrid of old school and digital gimmicks like postcards with GPS trackers, postcards as “non-fungible tokens”, and edible and disappearing postcards.

These trends, though, are likely to fade into the ether as quickly as most things on the TikTok-verse

But the humble postcard – stripped down to its paper-and-ink essentials – will endure for, as one cafe owner in Taipei remarked: “Memories fade quietly, but it will live forever on paper.”