Postcards from everywhere
When we were last in Korea, I grabbed a postcard in Busan, scribbled a few words, and had my daughter drop it in the mail.
From a sender’s perspective, the waiting game that followed was a bit anti-climactic. I wanted to share the moment instantly, like an Instagram post. But postcards belong strictly to the world of snail mail; this one took almost two months to reach its destination.
The enduring allure of postcards lies in their very nature: old-school, analog, and a breath of fresh air in a generation where artificial intelligence is steadily replacing human intelligence.
From the receiver’s point of view, it is delightful to know that someone, supposedly having the time of their life, paused to think of you. Even a message written in beautiful cursive adds a touch of class, a flash of mindfulness, to the experience. I would have loved to receive postcards from our late mother—in her fine cursive and an expressive, colorful writing style—although she did send enough letters whenever she was away.
The enduring allure of postcards lies in their very nature: old-school, analog, and a breath of fresh air in a generation where artificial intelligence is steadily replacing human intelligence. A postcard is inherently more targeted, personal and thoughtful than a mass blurb on a screen.
This fascination evokes the nostalgia of K-dramas like Reply 1988, in which handwritten radio letters and postcards embody the collective yearning of a simpler, more connected era. Conversely, this sentiment takes a dark turn in James Patterson’s The Postcard Killers, where a serial killer mails scenic cards before murdering couples, acting as a literal buzzkill to the whole postcard vibe.
In literature, authors frequently experiment with this tactile magic. Postcards from the Edge, a novel by Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia herself), evokes brief travel dispatches (not from a galaxy far, far away), but its opening act uses a strict epistolary format to highlight the protagonist’s emotional isolation. One of my favorites, Nick Bantock’s Griffin & Sabine trilogy, takes this further as an interactive masterpiece where readers pull beautifully crafted letters and illustrated postcards out of envelopes in the pages to chronicle a serendipitous romance. A similar magic anchors J.R.R. Tolkien’s Letters from Father Christmas, which collects decades of removable letters, complete with shaky “North Pole” handwriting and whimsical lore created for his children.
This craving for genuine human connection drives Postcrossing, a global online platform launched over 20 years ago by Paulo Magalhães—a man who loved receiving snail mail but was not getting enough of it. Postcrossing allows members to send postcards to random strangers worldwide and receive entirely different cards from other strangers in return.
Through Postcrossing, my mailbox turned into an eclectic global neighborhood. An Australian casually shared that she was lucky to see wild kangaroos every day. A Canadian sent a card from Sweden featuring a 17,000-year-old horse painting from Lascaux Cave in France. An American mom sent a gorgeous hand-painted postcard of a Japanese Kabuki actor all the way from Antwerp, Belgium.
The text on the back of these cards ranges from sweet to incredibly witty. An eight-year-old boy from Moscow said he loves dogs and puppies, while an 11-year-old in Utah prefers cats and fish. Meanwhile, a New Yorker blew them both out of the water by listing her household menagerie consisting of two cats, three dogs, a cow, a horse, and a staggering 36 goats!
Age brings its own sharp humor, too. A 14-year-old Dutch girl wrote that she firmly believes she should have been born in Japan or France, adding with pragmatic wisdom regarding her future world travels, “but I have to be rich.” A smart girl. From Poland, a Gen Xer confessed that he wrote because it annoyed his Millennial girlfriend.
The writing sometimes opens a window into a different worldview. A Russian poet shared a beautiful quote from the Soviet actor Yuri Nikulin: “If each of us manages to make another person happy—at least one—everyone on Earth will be happy.” Under current circumstances, he should have exchanged messages with a Ukrainian sender who wrote: “There are too many opportunities in the world to stay in one place.”
Sometimes, the commentary gets beautifully quirky. One mom from Oregon sent a card featuring Andy Warhol’s art, equating both pop art and the use of cursive handwriting with being delightfully “bourgeois.” A Chinese girl, judging purely by her elegant handwriting, wrote a line that perfectly captures our modern collective fatigue, stating she simply wants “to get rid of the smart things.” Hmm. You can’t help but ponder that one.
Perhaps the greatest gift of this hobby is geography by osmosis. I routinely receive postcards from places I was previously unaware of, prompting me to look up Lomonosov in Russia, Uppsala in Sweden, Sosnowiec in Poland, Zug in Switzerland, Suomi in Finland, Osnabrück in Germany, and the tongue-twisting Rokytnice nad Jizerou in the Czech Republic. I even learned about Herzogenaurach, a Bavarian town that hosts the global headquarters for both Adidas and Puma (formed by the estranged Dassler brothers, Adolf and Rudolf).
When you read through enough postcards, you realize something comforting. Across borders and languages, postcrossers almost universally list the exact same passions: reading, photography, music, travel, arts and crafts. The Europeans invariably add a love for drinking good beer and wine. Together, they sound like a classic Millennial checklist for a well-lived life.
Ultimately, that is the magic of the postcard. Whether it takes two or three months to cross an ocean or arrives with half the card smothered in tiny Russian stamps—like one I received from a teenage Muscovite—it connects us. It proves that beneath our high-tech facades, we are all just humans standing at the edge of our own little worlds, looking for a way to say, “We are different, yet we are just the same.”