Practically every email I’ve received in maybe the past year has started with “I hope you are well”. I even had an LLM draft a placeholder email for me and it started with the same thing. This has not always been the case and it’s strange to me that everyone I interact with begins their emails with this line. Frankly, it’s annoying AF.
What gives? Who started this? Why has it become so prevalent? More importantly, how do we stop it?
While I’m at it, if you work in tech / customer support, I urge you to speak with your supervisors to minimize the boiler plate copy paste trash you insert into your emails. People dealing with shit that’s not working as intended or desired do not have the mental or emotional capacity to wade through your platitudinal nonsense. Get to the fucking point.
It has it’s roots in actual letter writing, as in “I hope this letter finds you well”.
I always wonder what this means. Does it mean “I hope this letter does a good job finding you, and you can subsequently read it” or does it mean “When this does find you, I hope it recognizes you are having a good day”.
Stock boiler plate regardless and one of the best ways to convince the recipient you are a twat.
Imagine a time before instant communications, where you have no idea how life has treated the recipient since you last saw them and it might take months for your letter to arrive. It is a sincere hope that they are well and that tradgedy has not befallen them.
It would be neurotic and unreasonable if your last update on their life was only days or even hours before, but in the days of letters hope is really all you had. It’s just honest.
Pretty sure nobody has any real idea how to send text correspondence anymore.
Like, I work in a building 10+ miles away from my boss and often communication is done through text, email, occasionally by voice, but almost never in person.
Every time I send a work email to my boss/coworkers, I find myself staring at the screen wondering…“Wait, is there any particular way to start these things? ‘Dear So-n-So’ is really weird. ‘First/Last Name’ seems fine unless I’m sending the email to multiple people, which happens pretty regularly. Would just jump straight into the body of the text, but that seems… wrong somehow… and potentially confusing if an email address is not something that is human readable or mixed in with a list of email addresses.”
Eventually I just bang something out and figure, whatever, its not like 90% of my emails seem to get read by anybody anyways.
After some trepidation I’ll confess that I find these “hope you are well” also annoying though it depends who the sender is. What I find more annoying are the “OK, boomer” comments on the Internet. I mean what can you say after such a reply ?
One thing that I’ve found with junior staff is that they feel a need to be overly nice in their correspondence without realizing the interaction takes time.
