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The Curse of Email
- 03/10/11
- 14
Email is a curse. At least for many people it feels like a curse. Our inboxes fill before we can blink, we fight a never-ending and always-losing battle for inbox supremacy. The moment we win the battle, the enemy advances with another 2 or 5 or 25 emails. It doesn’t end. It won’t end. Many of us are constantly overwhelmed.
I’m convinced that one of the reasons we feel so overwhelmed by email is that we read it through an old and outdated paradigm. It used to be that mail carried a kind of significance, a kind of weight of importance. After all, I would only go through the trouble of recording thoughts on paper and placing them in an envelope and buying a stamp and putting that letter in the mail if I had something significant to communicate. Mail was important, it was the means by which I told you weighty things. I would never consider sending a letter that said nothing more than “HA!” and included a brief and silly newspaper clipping or, even worse, a notation telling you where you could find that silly clipping on your own.
Because I put effort into writing a letter and sending it to you, you in turn felt that it merited a response. So you would respond by putting your own effort into crafting a letter and you would go through the same process of stamping it and putting it in the mail. I expected no less. This was a well-established and formal procedure that consumed time, effort and resources. It mattered.
That was the paradigm before the digital age. And then email came along.
Email made it so easy, so quick, that receiving a letter lost what had made it special, it lost its significance. Today we receive mail in our inboxes instead of our mailboxes. They take a few seconds in transit instead of a few days or a few weeks. They consume no resources other than the few seconds it takes to type them out. With a click of a button we can send that same email to hundreds of other people, making each person believe that we have sent it only to him. This is the new paradigm: quantity over quality, immediacy over thoughtfulness, amusement over significance.
Most emails contain little of substance; they reflect little effort, little investment. I receive many emails every day that have little to say that is of any real significance. That is the nature of email. An informal medium, it does far better carrying informal content than truly weighty content. The medium has become the message.
I am not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing. I don’t mind getting an email that says only “LOL” and points me to a ridiculous news story. What has been freeing to me, though, is understanding this: I do not need to feel the obligations of the old paradigm. I do not need to feel those obligations toward this piece of mail and the person who wrote it. In the old paradigm letters reflected time and attention and were given time and attention in return. In the new paradigm an email that requires no effort demands no effort in return. This is how it has to be.
The only way we will avoid being crushed by the weight of the hundreds or thousands of emails we receive every day is to free ourselves from the need to treat each one like it matters and like it merits a response. The only way we will avoid being emotionally crushed by having other people not respond to our emails is to stop expecting a response. If we can adapt our expectations to fit the realities of this new paradigm, we will all crawl out from under the weight of the curse of email. Email will prove a blessing.
I am a follower of Jesus Christ, a husband to Aileen and a father to three young children. I worship and serve as a pastor at 
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Comments (14)
Tim, great observation. I feel the same way about news media today also. My wife and I went to Old Sturbridge village in MA recently and we saw the old printing press where newsletters had be created a letter at a time. It just made me think that if something was going to get printed it had to first have value and second word choice and command of the English language was important to say as much as possible with as few words as possible (unlike this post). And now we have twitter which will gladly expose every little though that crosses our minds regardless of usefulness or edification.
Good analogy between old fashion letters and emails and I can appreciate the burden that our inboxes have become. I can’t imagine what yours must look like. Phew.
While I agree that we may not be obligated to reply to many emails, I also see that some emails are indeed written with great care and investment of time or are from those with whom we have or have had close relationships. To not reply to these, whether on email by phone call or in-person, would feel unloving and disrespectful and even dishonoring to the Lord.
I still write letters to a few select friends. With one friend, we write in a notebook and send the notebook back and forth. I can’t remember the last time I received an email from a friend - most of them are business-related, server updates, or things people have forwarded to me that they think I’ll enjoy. I think, because of that, I’ve never been tempted to give email more weight than it should have, and for that I’m thankful.
I’m a programmer and it seems the more time I spend on the computer, the more I don’t want to. I’m definitely looking forward to receiving your book (pre-ordered from…somewhere).
Uh, yeah. That’s rather obvious Tim. It seems as if some people are really having a problem sorting all of this out. Scan through your emails about once a week after reading the important ones, and then delete them all. All of them. Everyone of them. Gone forever. Like good conversation, those interchanges were not meant to be recorded.
I hate phones. Almost never talk on a phone and despise them. Especially the ones that people carry around. If I can’t talk directly to a person, then I don’t want to talk to them at all. If you are one of those people who got a cell phone at eight years old so that your mommy could track you every minute of your day, then you probably are addicted to mommy.
So many people are trapped by voices and texts over their phones and notes in their email that they don’t even realize that there is life out there. In the real world. I don’t waste my time with folks talking and texting in front of others. I just walk away. The foolishness is so rampant that you can’t even talk about it without offending EVERYONE. Good grief.
ps. the snail is really cute!!
THANK YOU.
My sister-in-law sent this article to me, knowing how frustrated I am with email. I gave up facebook for lent (and perhaps forever) because I feel like it is robbing my relationships of their significance. If the only time I correspond with you is on facebook, how close can we really be?
It frustrates me when I have so many friends and family in other countries/provinces/states who facebook offered a personal peek into their daily lives, and made me feel close to them although we are far apart. When I tried to remove everyone from my facebook but the people I really need to keep in touch with it, I got raked over the coals and people were terribly offended.
Isn’t that sad?
I’m learning that I have to adapt to this culture and still maintain my own sincerity amid all the insignificance. I’m a huge fan of snail mail and always have a basket full of cards and note cards at the ready, and stamps in my wallet.I’ve been called a “New Fogie” on several occasions for my traditional ways and I appreciate someone else who feels similarly to me.
God bless you!
interesting thoughts. i think this discussion fits into a larger discussion about communication, interpersonal relationships, and what we value as individuals/a society. i recommend you check out You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier. he writes from within the circles of silicon valley (and fields of A.I.) and as a secular humanist, but he has ideas that goes against the tide of the current inertia of technologists and the quest for singularity. i’d be curious to hear your thoughts. the first section of his book (worth the read by itself) asks the question, “what is a person?”
I’m gradually coming to believe the Internet and all its various mediums (email, facebook, twitter, etc) are just a second attempt at building the Tower of Babel only this time we refuse to give up after God cursed our communication.
Great post and I agree. We are ruthless with not allowing pass-on e-mails from our contacts (where they send the same e-mail to everyone in their address book). We respectfully request not to receive these pass-ons. If it continues, we block the person. Why? With the deluge of silly pass-ons from multiple people, it just created clutter/stress/work, and we’d sometimes miss the personal, important or significant e-mails because they got lost in the crowd of e-mails. Since we have gotten ruthless with this, most of the e-mails that we receive are actually personal. And we are better able to keep in touch and respond to personal things.
Strangely enough, I’ve never felt this pressure with the email. I’ve always regarded it in the way you describe. This probably has to do with me growing up with the Internet while in high school. I understood innately how email worked, and haven’t had an issue with it.
Now, I don’t necessarily like it. But I don’t get paralyzed by it. Email and all this stuff does add to the noise of this culture. And wouldn’t old Screwtape be excited by that?
Good read. Instead of saying “what email, I never received it”. We should simply say, I have this new pay-per-click email system at work. It costs me 54 cents (price of 1 stamp) to open each email. Sorry, at that price, I cant open them all. :)
A few observations:
First, I use e-mail a lot less than before I got on Facebook. Now, some of the people I communicate with will message me through Facebook versus regular e-mail. My e-mail box still remains full though with messages from people not on Facebook or those who choose not to communicate through that forum. I also still have a few things I subscribe to that I either can’t get delivered to Facebook or don’t want delivered there.
Secondly, you talked about e-mail consuming “no resources other than the few seconds it takes to type them out” and how it delivers “immediacy over thoughtfulness”. I would disagree with that to some extent. Nothing is more maddening than trying to set up a meeting time with a group of people or to try to get consensus on a matter via e-mail only to have a small flurry of e-mails to go back and forth with those who can’t make the meeting time, so then everyone has to re-respond as to whether or not they can make the new, suggested meeting time. Or someone poses a disagreement on the matter which results in another flurry of e-mails and I just want to scream, “People, make a decision!”
Third, in business I’ve often been struck with how ridiculous it is to sit in the same building with people, maybe even on the same floor, and to have a flurry of e-mails go back and forth on a matter when we could have just as easily met in a room or at each other’s cube, discussed the matter and been done with it. But I know, we feel like we’re saving time because if I can send you an e-mail and not leave my desk, conceivably I can be doing other things while I wait for your response. More and more though, I think we’ve just become lazy and have accepted this as the way of doing business and getting things done. How often have we heard someone say or said it ourselves, “I haven’t heard back from them yet” and we passively wait for a response, blaming the delay on the other person’s lack of response. Yet, had we walked to their desk and talked about the matter we might have gotten a response and cut some time away from the issue. Instead, we sent them an e-mail and they are either away from their desk, in a meeting, out of the office or simply working on a response.
Victory, you are so right about the slap in the face to those whom we do not respond that have taken the time to craft a thoughtful response. Recently, my father was hospitalized and someone sent me an e-mail about a current church dispute. I told them about my father and that now was not a good time but I would get back to them with a response. A few days later I did just that and 6 weeks later this person has still not responded to me. Never even acknowledged my father’s sickness. Clearly, they only wanted what they wanted with no regard for me at all.
I’ve used email for almost as long as I’ve known how to write, and I haven’t really felt the pressure you describe. I’m wondering if this is at least partly a generational thing. My generation doesn’t really write letters, but I’ve been thinking about writing them again in order to communicate something important in an unusual, personal way. As someone who grew up with the internet, that kind of costly, personal investment is something I miss, and something I want to bring back.