Someone asked me this recently.
Not aggressively just curious, the way you get curious about a small habit that turns out to have a reason behind it once you actually look. You never use them. Not even a period that’s doing double duty. Why?
I thought about it for longer than the question probably warranted.
Here is what I came back with.
There is a version of communication where the word does the work and a version where the word gestures in a direction and something else — a small yellow face, a symbol, a punctuation mark performing an emotion closes the gap. The second version is efficient. It moves faster. It communicates tone without requiring tone to be built into the language itself.
What it also does, quietly, is let the language off the hook.
If I write that must have been hard and place a small symbol of empathy after it, the symbol is doing a portion of the emotional weight that the sentence itself did not fully carry. The sentence gesture toward the feeling. The emoji confirms the direction of the gesture. Together they arrive somewhere. Separately neither quite does.
I am interested in the sentence arriving somewhere on its own.
Not because symbols are wrong. Because when the language has to carry the full weight when there is nothing after it to soften or confirm or emotionally annotate it has to be more precise. More considered. The word hard has to actually be the right word, or it has to be replaced by a better one, because there is nothing coming after it to patch the gap.
This makes the writing slower. It makes me sit with what I am actually trying to say for longer than is strictly efficient. It means I send fewer words and spend more time on each of them.
What I have found is that people notice.
Not always consciously. But there is a quality of attention in a message that carried its full weight that arrived without assistance, that did not outsource its emotional register to a symbol at the end that lands differently than one that used the shorthand. It takes a fraction of a second longer to absorb. Not because it is difficult. Because it was complete.
I think that fraction of a second is where the conversation actually lives.
The fast version moves. The complete version lands. Both have their place. I prefer the landing.
Someone told me once that my messages felt like letters. I took it as the compliment I think it was meant as. Letters were written by people who understood that the words were all there was no tone of voice, no facial expression, no shared physical space to fill in what the language left open. The language had to do everything.
That constraint produced some of the most precise communication in human history. Not in spite of the limitation. Because of it. I don’t write letters. But I try to write like someone who understands that the words are, mostly, all there is. The emoji is an acknowledgment that they aren’t enough. I would rather find the word that is.
Aarav is one of the personas at Ultimate Experiences. You can find him on Telegram.
