As a college student living far from home, there’s little that lifts my mood more than receiving a hand-written letter. My freshman year in particular, I trekked home each day with the hope of finding a new tidbit about so-and-so’s life in my mailbox. Notice I didn’t say inbox.

Now that I’m on co-op and Gmail is a seemingly permanent fixture on my web browser, which I stare at for a significant part of my day, e-mail has become a chore—certainly not my first-choice media for catching up with friends. But more and more, Facebook and Gmail are taking the place of traditional post. I’m guilty too: on a college student’s budget, it’s hard to purchase stamp books on a bi-weekly basis; it takes a small but significant toll on the already hard-hit wallet.

Still, it saddens me to read about the repercussions of opting for convenience. Today, the San Francisco Chronicle published an article regarding the dismal state of the United States Post Office, and their serious financial struggles.

Journalist Carolyn Lochhead quoted the Postmaster General as saying, “The time to change the frequency of delivery is now.”

But don’t delivery cutbacks denote job cutbacks?

The Post Office is second only to Walmart in US employment, with 600,000 active workers. Congress, too, is showing an aversion to eliminating Saturday post, rationalizing that it will only add fuel to the fire (i.e. with even longer estimated delivery times, fewer businesses will be interested in sticking with traditional shipping methods).

While the decline in business mail is cited as the biggest contributor to the decline in post during the last five years, I can’t help but feel us regular folk are part of the problem. Every time I choose to “chat” with my sister in India instead of writing her a decently lengthy letter, I have insta-guilt. The feeling is twofold: nothing will ever truly take the place, or rather, the sentiment, of a hand-written card or letter. Somehow, in my mind, efforts to keep in touch are somehow validated more so with a letter than with Skyping. Secondly, by choosing a more convenient method of communication, I’ve become a contributor to the statistics; mail volume has decreased 17 percent in just three years!

So, the question is this: do we invite, or do we e-vite?