“What’s your email address?” I asked a young person I know the other day. I was planning to send him some information on a job he was interested in.
He emitted an exasperated sigh.
“I don’t really use email?” he said, employing the lilting upward inflection at the end of the sentence that young people use when they’re talking to someone ancient and decrepit. “It’s, like, mostly text? Or you can get me on Insta?”
I made a mental note to forget to send anything to the little brat. Let him first learn to end a sentence on a tonal downward inflection, like a decent person.
That’s an unfair reaction, I know. Since everyone now has multiple accounts on multiple services — Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, email, text, and other things I’m too old to know about — we all have our preferred inbox. It’s sort of like the way certain woke types like to specify their pronouns: “Hi, I’m Tyler: he, him, his.” We now all need to declare our preferred inbox, too: “Hi, I’m Tyler: he, him, his, Facebook Messenger, Snap, LinkedIn.”
I made that last part up. No sane person would ever choose to be contacted through LinkedIn.
I know a guy who has ranked the ways he’d prefer to be contacted. Email is ranked second — he’s older, and email, I now know, is an old person’s thing — followed by texting. Further down the list are Facebook Messenger, DMs on Twitter, and an actual, real live phone call.
But on top of his list, the No. 1 way in which he’d prefer to be contacted, is this: “Not at all.”
He explained to me that he knows this is an unrealistic preference. He’d be satisfied, he said, if people would wait 24 hours between feeling the impulse to contact him and actually following through. In those 24 hours, he predicts, the feeling will subside, and the need to reach out with one of those “just want to pick your brain” DMs or “do u have time 2 talk?” texts or endless “FWD: FWD: FYI, fyi, IN RE:” email chains will die a natural death. His inbox, and his blood pressure, will be spared undue stress.
A business acquaintance of mine has a solution to all of this. He’s a high-profile figure in a glamorous industry, so he receives dozens and dozens of random emails a day, and they stack up like firewood week-in and week-out until his inbox is over-full and the little red badge on the email app on his iPhone, the one that announces how many unread emails are awaiting attention, shows more than “11,000.”
His strategy is one that many financiers use to get out of obligations: He declares bankruptcy.
A couple of times a year, he clicks through his email inbox, which is always packed with unread emails and unanswered queries, surveys this inventory, and feels the stress building up, the tightness in his chest as he realizes that there’s no way ever to catch up. Then he clicks Select All and then Delete.
Just like that.
His jaw unclenches, his breath returns to normal, and he relaxes in the soft and healing glow of just giving up.
None of the erased messages were urgent. None were necessary. He has done this for years and has yet to regret it.
This month, I’m going to do the same thing, but I’m going one step further. We all have unread emails, but we also have unread e-books, unheard podcasts, and terabytes of unwatched TV shows on our DVRs.
I have been telling myself I’ll get to them. I have been promising myself that this weekend, or next week, or during a week at the beach, I will read, listen to, and watch everything that’s been building up in my various inboxes and accounts and “Save for Later” lists, even though I know this will never happen.
No more lying to myself. I’m going to zero out my DVR, erase my Kindle, remove all of the music from my phone, and clear away my email inbox. I’m declaring multidevice bankruptcy, universal digital Chapter 11. It’s going to feel fantastic. I’ll be lighter, more buoyant — a brand new me.
And what makes it even more delicious to contemplate is that somewhere in one of the email inboxes or DM accounts is going to be a message from my young friend wondering when I’m going to send him the information he wanted.
“Just checking in?” his email will say. “Just following up on this?” his text will read. But by then, it will have been Select All’d and Deleted. And if we ever do connect again, somehow, I’ll just say, “Sorry? I guess I missed your email?”
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
