It is a truism known to online moderators[1] that when two commenters are going back and forth in heated exchange, and one lays out rejoinders in paragraph after paragraph of dense text, then two things will have happened:
- Our careful communicator may or may not have succeeded at conveying well-reasoned insights hitherto unknown by his interlocutor that will change her mind.
- He will have communicated my hatred for you is at least this long.
In all seriousness, words require effort and effort requires motivation. A lengthy message communicates whatever its contents are, but it inevitably communicates I was invested enough to write all this, typically with a connotation of strong emotion powering the keystrokes. The emotion isn't necessarily hatred. It could be a roiling anger, a neurotic anxiety, or a fervorous infatuation.
My guess is that even if you weren't carrying around an explicit belief in your head that word count = emotional intensity, you tacitly have it and if you received an unusually lengthy email or text from your partner/friend/boss, then you'd have the reaction oh f***, something *is* up.
This inference is made all the more solid because your partner/friend/boss (assuming they are well-hinged) predicts that you would interpret a sudden lengthy message as something is up and therefore would only actually send such a message if that were truly the case. And you knowing that they think that...well this recursive reinforcing mutual prediction means that we're all in agreement that big message means big deal.
We are now 266 words into this post and the very reasonable question then is, ok, what's motivating you, Mr. Author, to write all these words?
Sometimes I find myself really wanting to send a long message. I didn't set out to write a long message! It felt like it'd be small and quick and easy and then it just got longer and longer each time I tried to make it accurate and clear. I really didn't mean for it to be three whole paragraphs! But I would like to still like send it – heck, it's already written! I suppose I could pare it down but ironically that'd take a whole lot more investment than I feel like putting in right now.
Ultimately, I'm at odds with the unavoidable meta-message. I don't actually want to pull the this-is-a-big-deal alarm. The big deal alarm can have all kinds of undesired effects such as the recipient becoming excessively anxious about the object-level message content[2], or inferring that I'm having big-deal emotions that they need to reassure/manage, or experiencing an obligation to respond promptly or at length. Any of these can be unpleasant for them, or me, and then possibly I get embroiled in more of a lengthy exchange than I feel motivated to engage in myself...
At the risk of adding more length, let me give you an example. I'm friends with one of my exes. I saw her recently and afterwards we swapped a few messages. I impulsively sent a message that a few minutes later I regretted. So I then impulsively deleted it (which leaves a "deleted message" placeholder), then I was like, oh no, that could just make it more awkward! I figured it'd be best to just dump my thought process, tell-culture style.
Well, by the time you sketch a thought-process and clarify all the things you don't mean and provide some maybe/maybe not needed reassurances, you find yourself having employed a couple of paragraph breaks and four bullet points.
Undeniably, I was feeling some anxiety about my careless remark – I value both how my ex feels and our connection, but it wasn't that big of a deal. I knew that. I also knew that if I could just convey my thoughts, it would definitely be fine. Just...only if I could convey them without risk of pulling the big-deal alarm.
I know! I'll add some paragraphs to my message explaining that really everything is actually really quite fine, you needn't worry, you don't have to reply much...Yes! If I clarify this in my message, I can overcome the unavoidable meta-message and she'll know I'm chill.
You laugh. But actually I did add a sentence to that effect and she said (paraphrased) "lol. you don't have to worry about sending long messages. I empathize. I too also sometimes want to send a message to clarify after possibly awkward social situations but then the message itself is awkwardly long". I said, "Hmm, maybe I should write a blogpost[3]".
And here we are.
If you were sent this post, it's likely because someone wanted to send you a lengthy message while trying to avoid the unavoidable meta-message. I hope they partly succeed to the extent they're being honest with themselves and you. At the end of the day, you wouldn't write a long message unless you felt enough motivation to do so. There's no denying that something is a little up. There's a little investment in something, and yet, they probably want to say:
In truth, this post is hoping to shape communication norms a little.
This inference is made all the solid because your partner/friend/boss (assuming they are well-hinged) predicts that you would interpret a sudden lengthy message as something is up and therefore would only actually send such a message if that were truly the case. And you knowing that they think that...well this recursive reinforcing mutual prediction means that we're all in agreement that big message mean big deal.
I'd like it to be the case that while a lengthy message is necessarily motivated by some emotion, it's understood that some people find it easy to write and feel best after having honestly and openly traded mental states. It's not that big a deal necessarily. Of course the details of the message and other circumstances will either support or contradict any claim that the sender is in fact chill[5].
How long is long?
By "long" I mean like even 100 words / two paragraphs when initiating a new exchange of text/messenger/Signal/etc, though it's pretty contextual. If you have an 1,000+ word essay, by that point I think you should say something like "I would like to send you a 1000+ word letter, is that okay?", though heuristically that's inadvisable and it'd be better to have a live chat if you've ended up in social scenario that requires that much bandwidth to resolve, or otherwise some heavier negotiation of the communication.
If a live a chat doesn't feel realistically, then probably a really long letter isn't going to help either, and you're not in any of the kind of the mild not-actually-a-big-deal scenarios I was addressing here.
Don't send unwanted long messages. Ok, how do I know if they're unwanted?
If you don't know the person and there isn't existing trust, proceed with extreme caution.
For the most part, it's long-standing friendships/partnerships/relationships where longer messages are appropriate, or messages where it's understood that more investment is being made in the relationship in order to to adapt to each other, e.g. nascent romances or new working relationships. Definitely, be wary of longish romantic messages to anyone who hasn't reciprocated the sentiment.
If you have ever sent someone one a long message, their reaction to it should be a guide to whether you ought to ever send another. If you've sent multiple different people long messages to which they've not responded gratefully, then you might be doing something wrong and you should figure that out rather than sending more.
You want to be one of the people who improves the prior on long messages being useful and sent by level-headed reasonable people (thereby increasing the communication bandwidth commons) and not one of the people who increases the ugh field around them. Please. If you do the latter because of this post I will be sad and regretful.
If someone didn't reply yet to a long message, you just gotta wait and see. Do not send follow up[s] and imagine that your messaging is compatible with things being chill. If someone was glad for a message, it will probably not be ambiguous.
Kudos to @Raemon for highlighting this point to me originally. Though he points out that @jimrandomh might have been the one to point it out to him.
A hard kind of message to send is a quick "btw, I didn't like X that you did". If it's short, they might misunderstand the feedback. And if it's long, it makes it seem like it was a bigger deal than it perhaps was.
The ultimate message length reduction trick is to submit things you predictably want to say as LessWrong posts and then only interact with other people who are fluent in the LessWrong memespace.
"I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal, (1623-1662)
If anyone uses this post to send unwanted lengthy messages, I will be pissed.