alt Hacker NewsMy first teaching job was at a prestigious boys’ boarding school. A colleague who had the next desk in the staff room was also head of the first-formers’ boarding house, which meant he received an awful lot of emails from anxious parents about their not-quite-so-anxious sons. He left all these emails unread for a fortnight, because after this time the issues (or non-issues) had usually resolved themselves.
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"Please help, my son is bullied"
After two weeks: it solved itself, he committed suicide.
Ah, for days of yore, when if the parents wanted to talk to the school, they could… write a letter.
Honestly, I see no small part of the problem here as being that communication is too easy, and it results in a lot of frivolity. Used to be that you had a problem, you figured it out - now you can send an angry WhatsApp message, and because some person hasn’t responded to you within 20 seconds, they are now your problem, and any initiative to figure it out yourself has flown the coop.
I am cross-quoting from N.N. Taleb, forgive my errors, but to me it's something in the line of "If you want to be cured from reading the newspaper, spend a week reading old newspaper."