Do we really need.... Open Letters?

Here is my plea to everyone who has felt the need to pen an open letter (in the words of Felonius Munk): Stop it B.  I've never really noticed this phenomenon, but it's been happening right in front of my face for at least the past 5 years.  I was recently browsing Medium and came across an article titled: An Open Letter to My Daughter.  You want to know why I didn't link to it?  Because when I Googled: "An Open Letter to My Daughter", it came back with 181,000 f*cking results.  One hundred, and eighty one thousand f*cking results.  And notice I used quotes to ensure each word will appear in every search result.

Source: my Google search results.

Couldn't you just tell your daughter face to face?  Especially the letters to the "unborn daughters" - f*cking serious?  That girl is, literally, at least 10 years out from comprehending anything you've written, 15 years out from being able to search for it, and by then - the blog you're housing it on might not even EXIST by then.

That's not the goal of the open letter, though.  No one expects the open letter to actually reach the intended recipient.  The goal of the open letter is to put on display how deep and insightful the author is, or how strong and willed they are.  It has nothing to do with whom the letter is actually written to.  I'm not sure what people with Mensa cards do all day (or the people who receive MacArthur grants), but I know they're wasting their time not conducting an in-depth study to find how often the person the open letter is written to actually reads the open-letter.

Moving Forward

Feel compelled to write an open letter?  Follow this

1. Start writing the open letter
2. Finish the open letter
3. Kill yourself before posting it to the internet.

No, the irony is not lost on me that this is, in fact, an open letter of sorts.