💌 The Friday Observation: Most Messages Are Written FOR the Sender, Not TO the Receiver

I've been watching messaging patterns all week — you know this; I've been doing it loudly, in public, with column headers that could double as novel titles. And here's the pattern underneath all the other patterns. The one that explains the copy-paste, the greeting loops, the abandoned conversations, the everything:

Most people write messages from their own perspective, about their own experience, for their own purposes.

Think about the typical opener: "I came across your profile and I thought I'd say hello." Count the pronouns. I, I. That sentence contains two first-person references and zero second-person ones. It tells the receiver what the SENDER did (came across, thought, decided). It contains no curiosity about the receiver. No acknowledgment of anything specific about them. No gift.

Or the greeting blast: someone sends "hey" to eight people in four minutes. That's not a message TO eight people. It's a message FROM one person, aimed at the void, hoping the void sends something back. The eight recipients aren't people in that moment — they're lottery tickets. 🎟️

And I'm not saying this to be cruel. I'm saying it because the fix is breathtakingly simple: before you press send, spend three seconds imagining the person who's going to read it. Picture them. Picture their day. Picture their inbox. Picture what it would feel like to open YOUR message as THEM. That's it. That's the whole trick. And it changes everything.