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I Have 61,966 Unread Emails—and I Don’t Care

Pick out the important messages and leave the rest. It’ll change your life

IF MY INBOX were a physical space, it would be the before scene from an episode of Hoarders—years and years of unsorted, often unopened messages, like the bags of old clothing you are going to take to Goodwill any day now (but which currently live rent free in the front hall closet). This spring, my unread message count sat at 61,966, a tally I hadn’t given much thought to until it upended a recent group chat. There we were, a bunch of girlfriends discussing plans for the weekend; I sent a screengrab where my inbox icon happened to be visible at the bottom of the shot, and I swear you’d think I’d just passed on illegal porn. “OMG, your inbox!” one friend texted followed by the monkey-covering-eyes emoji. Another suggested she might actually “die” in the same circumstances, while a third explained the concept of unsubscribing—never mind that I was not asking for advice.

I could. Unsubscribe, that is. It’s just that, every now and then, I get a newsletter with a subject line that inspires me to click. (Even when I don’t, just scanning some subject lines gives me a sense of keeping up with the news.) I’ll spot a recipe or a travel deal, or Old Navy’s “50 percent off” sale notification will land just in time for back-to-school shopping. I don’t need to open monthly messages from Rogers or Enercare to know what’s in them (sigh). I guess I could organize these records into subfolders, but with the facility of the search function, isn’t that just busy work?

Of course, I realize this personal anecdote speaks to a larger modern fissure. You might remember a version of that meme from years ago that read, “There are two types of people in this world,” with one picture of an overstuffed inbox and another at zero. The 2015 tweet went viral because most people instantly identify as belonging to one camp or the other (Team Inbox Infinity, thank you very much), but also because of the way email has established a chokehold on modern existence. Over forty years ago, the ability to communicate on the information superhighway was hailed as a great liberator—an advanced technology that was going to clear up space on our schedules and in our brains. But flash forward, and the tail is most definitely wagging the digital dog.

The accessibility of email might allow you to answer your boss from the cottage dock, but it has also destroyed what was once a boundary between work hours and the rest of life. We are, most of us, beholden to the almighty ping or ploop, signals that can trigger both a reward response (dopamine) and a stress response (cortisol); and if that sounds a lot like a toxic relationship, that’s the point.

JENNIFER LAFFIER IS an associate professor at Ontario Tech University. In 2020, she........

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